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An honors student isn’t complete without an impressive resume. Once you’ve perfected the content of your resume, it’s important to make sure it has a polished design. Some employers may not give a resume a second chance if it’s not easy to read and at least somewhat pleasing to the eye. While there are many templates available for purchase online, college students on a budget can make use of free websites that allow for even more customization. With potentially hundreds of combinations of color, layout and graphics, these design programs can let your creative side out when finalizing your resume.
One of the options on this photo editor is the Designer, which is home to dozens of templates for events, small businesses and social media. Navigating to templates > small business > letterhead pulls up templates that can be broken down to create a fully customized resume. This site is perfect for the designer who dislikes templates that come with rigid sets of guidelines. Sometimes, however, freedom can be a challenge. If you are not experienced with design websites such as BeFunky, make sure your final product doesn’t turn out sloppy or unprofessional.
While many templates on this website require a BeFunky subscription, a polished resume can still be created with the use of a free template and a little design know-how. Pick an eye-catching color for the graphic elements and place text boxes on any part of the page before adding the content of your resume.
This graphic design site is well-loved by millions of college students around the world. With 50,000 templates, hundreds of which are designed specifically for resumes, Canva offers an incredibly diverse selection, from in-your-face to understated. Sorted into 15 categories by type of resume, from minimalist and modern to creative and colorful, the site is easy to navigate and simple to troubleshoot. Sign in with your GCU student email for access to all of the free templates, in addition to millions of photos and graphics.
Similar to Canva, DesignBold is home to an intuitive interface that makes compiling a resume simple for graphic design novices. While the selection of templates is less diverse than that of Canva, the sophisticated choices are well suited to certain genres of job opening, such as business or technical positions, and even more stock images and graphics are available. Creations can be saved directly to Dropbox, and live support is offered if you encounter any problems while designing your masterpiece.
With all of these options, it can be easy to get carried away. Make sure the nearly unlimited creative choices don’t distract you from your quest to design a professional resume, and take advantage of your resources: GCU’s ACE Centers is open to everyone to set up a one-on-one resume review with a career advisor and get extremely valuable personalized feedback. An expert opinion can help with not only the design of your resume, but the content, which is always the most essential part.
To learn more about joining our community of motivated and driven students at GCU’s Honors College, click the Request More Information button on this page or visit our website.
