Graphic designer resume example and writing guide

For a design job, the hiring manager will judge you mostly on your portfolio. The resume has a narrower job: get you past the first screen, show that you have worked on real briefs with real deadlines, and make the portfolio link impossible to miss.

That means the two should tell the same story. If your resume says you led a packaging refresh, that project should be in your portfolio with the brief, your process and the final result. A recruiter who sees a claim on the resume and then finds the proof one click away is far more likely to shortlist you.

• Work that fits their kind of design — a packaging company wants to see packaging, an app company wants to see screens and flows.
• Evidence that you can take a brief, ask good questions and deliver on time, not only make attractive images.
• The tools they use day to day, named plainly so they can be found in a search.
• Experience with print production, digital formats or both, depending on the role.
• Comfort working in more than one language where the job needs it — many Malaysian brands run campaigns in Bahasa Malaysia, English and Chinese.

Designers are often tempted to send a resume that is itself a piece of design: icons for contact details, skill bars, text placed inside shapes, or the whole page exported as an image. The problem is that an applicant tracking system reads text, not layout. If your name, job titles or software are part of a graphic, the system may see nothing at all.

Keep a clean, text-based resume with real headings, one main column and standard section names such as Experience, Education and Skills. You can still show taste through spacing, a good typeface and careful alignment. Save the expressive work for your portfolio, and if a studio asks for a creative resume, send it alongside the plain version rather than instead of it.

The example below is for a designer with about seven years of experience. The name, companies and figures are illustrations — replace them with your own, and only use numbers you can explain in an interview.

Name and title line: Chong Mei Yee — Senior Graphic Designer. Petaling Jaya, Selangor · chongmeiyee.design@example.com · 012-345 6789 · Portfolio: behance.net/nurulaina (put your own link here, written out in full so it works when printed).

Summary: Senior graphic designer with seven years in agency and in-house roles, specialising in packaging and campaign design for food and retail brands. Comfortable taking a project from brief and concept to print-ready files and supplier checks, in Bahasa Malaysia, English and Chinese layouts.

Experience 1: Senior Graphic Designer, Rasa Harian Foods Sdn Bhd (fictional), Shah Alam, 2022 – present.

• Lead packaging design for a range of 40 snack and sauce products, working with marketing, regulatory and the printer from concept to press check.
• Redesigned the main product line’s packaging, keeping the brand recognisable while fitting bilingual labelling onto smaller packs.
• Set up a shared template and asset library in Figma and InDesign, so the team stopped rebuilding the same layouts for every festive campaign.
• Brief and review the work of two junior designers and one freelancer, and present concepts to the marketing director.

Experience 2: Graphic Designer, Studio Kertas Biru Sdn Bhd (fictional), Kuala Lumpur, 2018 – 2022.

• Designed print and social media campaigns for about 15 clients, including property launches, retail promotions and Hari Raya and Chinese New Year campaigns.
• Produced key visuals and adapted them into more than 30 formats per campaign, from billboards to Instagram stories.
• Created short motion graphics in After Effects for social ads, which the studio then offered to clients as a regular service.
• Prepared print-ready files and checked colour proofs with printers, reducing reprints caused by file errors.

Education: Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Graphic Design, name of university, Kuala Lumpur, 2017. Add your final-year project title if it is relevant to the jobs you want.

Certifications and courses: list only those that add something, such as a UX design course or a motion graphics course, with the provider and year.

Skills: Design tools — Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Figma · Print — packaging dielines, colour proofing, press checks · Digital — social media formats, basic HTML email layouts · Languages — Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mandarin.

• Junior: “Graphic design graduate with internship experience at a branding studio, where I designed social media posts and event materials for three clients. Confident in Illustrator, Photoshop and Figma, and keen to grow in brand and campaign design.”
• Experienced: “Graphic designer with five years in a retail marketing team, producing in-store, print and digital campaigns on tight seasonal deadlines. Known for organised files, clear presentations and work that printers rarely send back.”
• Career changer: “Former marketing executive moving into design, with two years of producing campaign visuals in-house and a completed graphic design certificate. I bring an understanding of briefs, budgets and what a campaign has to achieve.”

Each example shows what you did and what changed. Swap in your own projects and figures.

• Branding: “Developed a new logo and brand guidelines for a café chain opening its fifth outlet, used across signage, menus and uniforms.”
• Branding: “Rewrote the brand guidelines into a 12-page quick guide, so franchise outlets produced on-brand material without checking with head office.”
• Packaging: “Adapted packaging artwork for export to Singapore and Brunei, updating labelling and barcodes to each market’s requirements.”
• Packaging: “Cut the number of printer corrections by building a pre-press checklist for every packaging file.”
• Campaigns: “Designed the key visual for a Ramadan campaign and adapted it into print, outdoor and digital formats within three weeks.”
• Campaigns: “Produced A/B variants of social ad creatives each week, helping the marketing team keep the best-performing designs running.”
• Digital and UI: “Designed landing pages and email templates in Figma, handing over specifications that developers could build without guesswork.”
• Motion: “Animated 15-second product videos in After Effects for Instagram and TikTok, replacing static posts in the main campaign.”
• Process: “Organised a shared asset library with naming rules, so the team found approved logos and photos in seconds instead of asking around.”
• Collaboration: “Presented three concept routes to the client at each stage and turned feedback into revised designs within two working days.”
• Mentoring: “Trained two interns in file preparation for print, and both were later hired as junior designers.”

Agencies care about range, speed and handling several clients at once. Show variety in your bullets, name the industries you have designed for and mention how many projects you managed at a time.

In-house teams care about depth and consistency. Show that you know one brand well, worked with marketing, sales or product teams, and improved how the team works — templates, guidelines, approval steps. If you are moving from agency to in-house, pick the one or two clients you worked with longest and describe that work in more detail.

Name the software exactly as it appears in job ads — Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Figma — because recruiters search for those words. Put the tools you use every day first and leave out ones you opened once. Skip skill bars and percentages; “Photoshop 90%” tells an employer nothing, while a bullet showing what you made with it does.

• Put the portfolio link in your contact line, in full, and check that it opens without a login.
• Lead with six to ten of your strongest projects, chosen to match the jobs you are applying for.
• For each project, write two or three lines on the brief, your role and the result, especially for team projects.
• Show process for at least a few projects — sketches, rejected routes, the reasoning behind the final choice.
• Ask before showing client work that is not yet public, and remove anything covered by a confidentiality agreement.
• Keep a PDF version under 10MB for employers who ask for an attachment.