Design Agency Process Diagram

In Monday's post I went through a process of recentering myself, and identified four areas to focus on and track. The trickiest one was DESIGN AGENCY, because there are a LOT of different tasks.

I just finished creating a "process diagram" that outlines a high-level roadmap of agency operations; just about any task I can think of fits somewhere the diagram. You can read about and download the PDF over on the Agenceum Blog, which is where I am running my "open design agency" experiment. Although this diagram is labeled for Agenceum, it really is for ALL of my design-related business activities.

Read more about the diagram on the Agenceum blog.

Artistic Integrity and Profit

SUMMARY: I expand my "create then show" mantra to include the means of producing products and distributing them. Maybe this is the way to sell out with integrity.

>> READ FULL ARTICLE

Logos for Agenceum

In the meantime, over at Agenceum Intranet, I've been working on logos and sell sheets. Agenceum is the pseudo design agency I'm working on to give myself a focus for targeting super low-budget clients. My main focus at the moment is to just create some sellable templates that I can show to a few people in my local area; for that, I need to have a handout (the "sell sheet") that makes sense to them. Of course, such a handout should have some kind of logo on it! Whee!

• Logo Round 1 - the first pass at a "column" idea
• Logo Round 2 - a wrong turn, and a new design idea
• Sell Sheet Draft - pulling all the information together

If you're interested in process and how I am thinking about the design business, check it out and leave some comments.

Task Index Cards Revisited

A few days ago I posted the latest progress on the Day Grid Balancer forms, a line of inquiry that has attracted very high-quality commentary from you all. Special kudos go to John Ballantrae for using Tarot cards as a tool for design reflection. Instead of using the cards to "read me", he used them to reflect on the direction that the Day Grid Balancer might go. Despite what you might believe or not believe about the "psychic power" of Tarot Cards, the symbolism nevertheless does span a variety of human desires and anxieties; just by considering the interpretations of each drawn card, one can gain some insight by seeing how the symbolism might fit with the situation on your mind.

John posted his video tarot card reading for everyone to see, and in his 12-minute video he came up with several interesting insights. One that resonated was the sense of anxiety and frustration that is driving the development of the Day Balance Grid; he suggested that perhaps focusing on that would provide some new direction. It is very true that I have been feeling that I've not been keeping balanced, and that I was potentially forgetting important things. I had started to write up everything that was on my mind, which works fine when I'm doing it for other people. This time, though, I was stuck. The thought of seeing all those unfinished tasks and unfulfilled dreams was incredibly demotivating. Nevertheless, it had to be done.

When I went to re-watch John's video, the first three minutes suddenly stood out to me. He's doing nothing but shuffling his cards as he's explaining his approach to the reading. It's rather mesmerizing to see someone who is adept with cards shuffle and spread a deck, and several thoughts came to mind regarding the appeal of a card-based form factor:

• There is something cool about manipulating a deck of cards so much that they become familiar friends. John's Tarot deck is obviously well-used, and he's quite familiar with how it handles.
• Tarot cards use strong symbolic language that carry the power of self-reflection in them. The Rider-Waite Deck, with its illustrations of the various meanings of each card, is particularly fascinating to look at.
• Physically, cards are very easy to group, sort, and flip through. This is a huge boon to organization, and you don't have to rewrite anything.

I also just happen to like cards. A few years ago I had made something called the Task Order Up! that included index card versions of task cards, though the system was originally conceived in the spirit of order checks and check rails used at fast food restaurants. This system assigned a card to each task, which you could then array in front of your desk so your coworkers could see what you had going on. You could also prioritize task cards by putting them all the way on the side. But really, the driving force behind the Task Order Up! was that I thought check rails are cool, and I built the process around that.

card stacks versus to-do lists

What I have so far is a deck of personalized task cards for everything I had going on. Instead of standardizing the look-and-feel of each card (as they are in the Task Order Up!), I am allowing them to have individuality. My thinking is that the cards will take on greater representative power the more I scribble and draw on them.

One issue I had come across in the use of my Emergent Task Planner was that I had so many outstanding tasks that it was getting hard to review them all. I am going to make this easier in the next design by reverting to the "right hand side for notes" layout; this will allow me to fold the "to-do" list backwards so I can transcribe it more easily into the next day's task list. However, even in this case I'm forced to retranscribe data, which is a design no-no in my productivity form philosophy. With index cards, I can keep a master list in the form of a hand-held card deck.

Previously, I have maintained a master list electronically. For example, I recently used Google Tasks with Google Calendar. Results were mixed; Google Tasks is a little simplistic at the moment. An even older system I have used was a text editor to-do list, but since this is a local file I can't share with other computers. However, web-based to-do lists have the requirement that I am connected to the Internet, which limits the places where I can access them.

The advantage of electronic media over paper, of course, is the ease of reordering data. However, electronic media suffers when it comes to direct manipulation of overlapping data; there is a lot of clicking and dragging of the mouse, which is slow and makes comparison of data sets cumbersome. Cards do not have this disadvantage, and their tactile qualities make manipulating them a pleasure. They naturally lend themselves to manipulation; when you're dealt a hand of cards, the first thing you do is order them according to your strategic intent. Cards can be grouped, stacked, stuck together, taped, glued, and shuffled. Cards are also more pictorial, more solid, and make soothing noises as you shuffle them. Cards also afford a far richer repertoire of physical manipulation than the mouse, which I think is more helpful when thinking (I don't have any kind of citation for that, unfortunately).

design and process

I sat down with a blank pack of index cards and wrote out everything that I could think of that I needed to do.

I am starting to develop a visual vocabulary for the different kinds of tasks. Some cards are reminder cards that I will come across when I want to keep something on my mind. The "WAAH I'M FAT" card, for example, reminds me that I want to do something about that. There are some cards that I've marked with a symbol that means this moves you toward completing a strategic goal, and there's another symbol that means this supports other things you are doing. Some cards just have the names of people and projects on them. Some of them are process cards that describe how to do the laundry, and assign point values to the card.

There are lots of ordering and prioritization possibilties with a deck of cards. I can extract cards to prioritize tasks, putting them on the top of the deck. I can also group cards with small clamps or paper clips, which gives me a sense of the magnitude of a multi-step project. I can sequence cards in the order they need to be done. I just started this on Sunday, but already I find it comforting to know that everything that's on my mind is in this deck; I've found myself just shuffling through it seeing what was in there. It is like a portable version of my pickle jar. And I haven't even scratched the surface of the gaming possibilities around a custom-designed deck of cards. Collectible Color Card Task Management Gaming, anyone? Balance your Day by trying to get a Three-Of-A-Kind or Straight Flush? Unique Cards, with Webkinz-style Card Tracking and Social Media Integration via 43Things? Oh, my goodness.

Right now, the process I'm using is very simple: I'm just writing down stuff on index cards as they come to mind. The designs are sparse, but are already functionally evolving into distinct uses. When a task is completed, I'll pull the card from the deck and retire it. There are all sorts of neat index card hacks out there that could help as well. There's a nifty index card board on Unclutterer, for example, and Levenger makes those sweet index card holders and docks. However, what I'm more interested in doing is making a deck of beautiful, personalized cards that can be manipulated in my hands. We'll see where this goes.

Day Grid Balancer: Draft 2 Progress

I've been redesigning the prototype Day Grid Balancer based on the excellent feedback on draft 1. The overall consensus was that while the color and grid were very playful and attractive, their use as a day-to-day tool was limited. And confusing, because my categories don't line up with other people's categories. What seemed to work, though, was the idea of weekly balance. I guess the name of the form will have to change eventually, but the implication for right now is that this creates a LOT OF ROOM to play with on the left-hand side.

I was thinking of biorhythms, DNA spirals, and other patterns, so I drafted a version of the balance grid that, well, is kind of a mess but might give y'all some ideas in brainstorming an approach to make the thing work. I think there needs to be some kind of auxiliary marking within the grid itself, and some obvious place to leave notes, but I haven't gotten that far ahead. I'm planning on printing this out and just scribbling it on it sometime to see if anything pops up.

Thoughts? Here's a editable PDF file to play with, saved with Adobe Illustrator CS3. Creative Commons license applies, as before.

Spackling My Brand Identity: New Website Header!

One of the great sins of my personal branding effort has been to let a temporary photograph stand in as my website identity for so long. If you're reading this article through RSS you missed the new header image that has replaced the old collection of scotch bottles. I just didn't see the bottles anymore because I'm too close to the website, but every once in a while someone comments that they just assumed that my website is about drinking. I've resisted changing it until now, because I liked the photo, but I'm finally starting to define my design methodology and the image is incongruous with respect to a respectable practice. It's time to put my childish preferences aside.

The visual history of my website header is documented in my post Inadvertent Branding, but the short version of the story is that the bottles (see below) were a joking commentary on my cavalier attitude about moving my website between servers, live, without doing a whole lot of testing. At the time I was also rather fond of the colors in the image, taken with my previous-previous digital camera (a Canon PowerShot G2). Looking at the image now, I can see the nasty contrast issues. Check it out, preserved below for posterity:

The picture in the new header was taken at Starbucks with the 40D to illustrate a blog post, and was serving as (wait for it) a placeholder in my new website design. The new design, sadly, has not been going anywhere since January, so I decided to just grab the image from it. At least the new photo is somewhat informational in its subject matter. Plus, it has my two favorite pens in it (a Lamy Safari and Al-Star) laying on my favorite notebook (a Cachet Classic Graph). The eventual plan is to shoot a new header image depicting a ton of my favorite bits of gear used in support of my identity and design agency philosophy. But first, I've got to write it. So for now, this header will serve as a transitional brand image. That probably is some kind of no-no, but as I am also in a transition period, I am allowing for poetic license. So there. So much for growing out of my childish preferences.

Another transitional element I've deliberated added is the shift in colors toward the orange-blue palette that my latest business card is using:

The evolution of my business cards has never really matched the evolution of the website, but there's no more excuses now that I'm settling in a "design niche" I think is suited to my peculiar skillset and personality. To help, I'm using some language from the cards ("investigative designer") while retaining some of the keywords that the site has become known for ("productivity"). I also am using the gestalt dot story as a bullet for the design portfolio" button, which is now a little more obvious than before. I'm not sure if I like the bullet, but at least we're starting to get some repetition of elements between the business card and the website, which helps make it seem more like a "brand". It's not great consistency, but then again my so-called brand identity has always been somewhat "ambient" as opposed to "direct". Certain elements like proportions in my design work, color choice, typography, and use of photography have been fairly consistent over the past few years. The explicit use of my name has also been consistent; I demoted the original name of the blog, Better Living through New Media, to a subheader quite some time ago. This probably was a lucky decision, as I've discovered that I really do prefer to engage with people one-on-one, representing me-as-me.

So that's that. I'm giving myself another 10 years to fix the rest of it :-)

Day Grid Balancer: Assessment 1

It's been a week since I first started trying the new day grid balancer form, and in practice I found that it didn't quite mesh well with my expectations. Partly this may be due to the long weekend and the surprise visit of one of my best friends, which meant that I didn't adhere to the daily schedule I'm striving to put into place. Even when factoring that in, I think I can still say with confidence that there are several aspects I didn't like about the form:

• Filling out the little day balance grid was confusing because my categories didn't quite fit what I was really doing. They are not named quite right, even for me.
• I wasn't quite clear on what kind of things I should list. In hindsight I see I was mixing up several categories of task: things I want to "make time" to do, scheduled meetings, and ongoing projects. The sheet is also a little cramped for writing any more than a few words per item, though perhaps this is a good thing.
• I had a tendency to just want to use the day balance grid to just check things off to try to complete the figure, instead of noting time.

In short, I wasn't very clear myself on how I wanted to use the form, and this might also be due to imprecise expectations. On the other hand, I also knew that the first week run was unlikely to be quite right, which is why I'm doing this review. There were some useful insights:

• There's something kind of fun about the day balance grid that I like. People have commented it reminds them of Tetris® in its shapes, and perhaps that gives rise to the expectation of fun.
• Merely checking off a box does make me aware of the other areas I could be balancing, which I think is a good thing. The current design of the sheet, however, doesn't leverage this very powerfully. Perhaps a single larger diagram is the way to go.
• Having notes on what I did every day to achieve balance is very helpful in remembering what I did.
• My mindset was that of achieving balance through completion, not through doing. This may be because I feel I am bootstrapping a lot of projects to get new work lined up, and I perceive a long sequence of intermediate steps that will take time to complete. In other words, I'm "finish fixated".

That last point regarding completing versus doing is somewhat subtle; I'm thinking that some actions are inherently good because it is about the time spent in the process itself, and other actions are good because they "finish" something that needed finishing. For example, I'm told that fishing is quite relaxing, and that it is not about actually catching a fish and (as I used to presume) getting to eat it. If one is results-focused, then spending lots of time fishing and not catching any fish would be a big waste of time. However, for someone who enjoys the experience of fishing itself, the entire point is to be immersed in the pleasure of the activity itself.

So there are at least two elements of balance that I should be considering:

• Maintaining a healthy variety of achievements, which lead to balance of multiple prerequisites for security and happiness. This the working assumption behind the design of the current form.
• Remembering to engage in both immersive and results-oriented experiences. This is a distinction that is probably important to note.

So what should this form even do?

And even more important is to decide exactly what this form delivers. I'm not really sure yet. If I look inward to see what it is that's really on my mind, it's that I transform myself into a higher-performing version of myself so I can get my languishing projects done. Just about all these projects are related to either creating new business machinery or creating new ways of interacting with people en masse, which is also beneficial to me. The net result I expect from completion of these projects is more opportunity, both financially and socially.

So why even worry about balance when there's so much to do? The assumption I am testing is whether balance leads to consistent productivity. My gut says that this is part of it, and I keep coming across mentions on other blogs and books that seem to confirm this. Consistent productivity in my case is a matter of maintaining consistent momentum and motivation. I know certain activities inspire and energize me, and I know others drain me. When I am not getting things done AND not constantly exposed people energy pre-mixed with optimism, my motivation wanes.

If I leave this balance issue up to chance, then it's pretty likely that I'll have inconsistent days of productivity. This may actually be an acceptable choice, but I am also feeling that time is short and I need to get my ass in gear. Hence, the creation of a new form to help me track what I'm doing and improve my mindfulness. Improving mindfulness is, perhaps, the main point behind this form.

I'll probably take a second pass at this in the coming week. I'm also very curious about other people's experiences using the form. Feel free to leave a comment, and I'll try to address the feedback as much as possible in the second draft.

24 Boxes and Asymmetric Grids

My quest for work-life balance continues this week as I continue to ramp up on personal projects while stirring the business development pot. Although I'm not quite sure exactly what I want to balance, I do know that there are general categories that have contributed to my sense of well-being in the past. So, starting from the basic idea that I need four hours of billable work a day, I made a list of the other things that help me feel centered:

• productive work by myself
• productive communication with creative, positive people
• making sure that the crap isn't piling up at home
• putting time into health and the gym
• adequate sleep

There's a purposeful resemblance to something I read about 5 contributors to happiness via my friend Senia, which are:

1. sleep
2. exercise
3. nutrition
4. incremental actions
5. alone vs. social time balance

The tracker form that's developing in my mind is based around all these principles, and what I'd like to have is some kind of nice weekly form that will both show me at a glance and remind me what the work-life balance should be. I've also been liking the idea of using the asymmetric grids I mentioned last week, so this morning I had a chance to make a first pass at what it might look like over my morning Starbucks.

The basic idea is to have a kind of three-part stack of boxes, with room for overflow. The names and assignments of the categories are preliminary, so I'm open to suggestions on this. Here's what I have so far:

• The bottom stack is sleep. For me, I like to get 8 hours, though sometimes I sleep a bit more. Without adequate sleep, the rest of my day is kind of hosed, so that's why I put it on the bottom as a foundation for the rest of the activities.

• The center stack are core maintenance. The home category covers stuff like cleaning, dishes, laundry, doing bills, and other responsible things that we should be doing for ourselves. It's on the left, because I think of this as "left-brained" pragmatic thinking. The arrangement is a kind of little box, and there's a couple more boxes available for overflow. The center, which about heart or happiness, are for things that you do that make the day worthwhile. Maybe everything you do makes you happy, but I put the box here anyway to remind me that this is the point, to find a center of joy somewhere in the rest of what you do. On the right side are health type things. This is more about taking care of yourself, and under this I would include feeling and romance. It's that L-shape because it kind of is an encompassing gesture around the heart, and it's more open than the closed-up logical side. Plus, this introduces an asymmetry that helps break up the grid further, providing some eye relief that a straight grid design would not generate. You may notice that this center grid is offset from the top and bottom slightly to, to further create some visual interest.

• The top stack is about making stuff. For me, that's creating--the four boxes at the top are the four billable hours I want to seek. The two supporting elements on either side are for conversation, which is the creative dialog that's important to me. It's split in two to accentuate the idea that there are two people in a conversation, plus it creates a kind of neat super robot head shape. The whole stack is reminiscent of a giant Japanese robot comprised of smaller ships, combining in different ways.

Some other subtleties are the provision of extra boxes, because sometimes you'll spend more than the "ideal" number of hours. The stack of boxes is vaguely humanoid in shape, as I mentioned, to make it a little more personable in a way that a pile of boxes are not. There are also actually 26 boxes, because the two in the middle are extra. Maybe these will be bonus boxes when you do something that feels particularly awesome, a kind of bull's eye.

When I get a chance later this week I'll put together the rest of the worksheet, which I'm thinking may resemble a marriage of the Concrete Goals Tracker and the Emergent Task Planner. In the meantime, work beckons!

24 More Boxes

Yesterday I'd started doodling boxes on a piece of paper, idly wondering if I could somehow structure the coming days of toil into a set of 24 boxes. This represented, in hindsight, a desire to put some structure on my expectations and somehow guarantee a productive use of time. There's something pleasing about a grid of boxes. It's orderly! It's contained! It makes everything look clean and clear! Of course, it's also a pipe dream to believe that it could actually work, but on the other hand I'm a firm believer that the appearance of order plays a part in creating the motivation to keep going.

designing balance

Today's doodling expands on the theme of breaking up the day into boxes. Underlying the itch to structure the day is something new to my productivity form designing escapades: the desire to build balance into the task management. That presumes that there exists an algorithm for balance in the first place, and admittedly this has always been an area where I've suffered. However, in yesterday's post I decided that starting with four billable hours a day would be a good start; this is both sustainable and realistic in my freelancing experience, especially when considering all the additional non-billable stuff that I have to do.

I'm not going to get this form done today, but a few ideas have popped up:

1. There are many work-life balance systems in existence, each purporting to break down the formula to happiness into a number of essential categories. I don't happen to use any of them--which maybe explains a lot--but the idea of hour bins is very appealing from a tracking perspective. It's compact, visually countable, and looks orderly. I'd have to build in some way of enforcing the time element for it to be a workable system, though. In some ways this approach resembles the Emergent Task Timer, but the emphasis of that tool is to discover where your time has gone in the face of hectic days. The use of bins, which could be asymmetrically sized, encourages balance. Likewise the Concrete Goals Tracker is similar in that it encourages certain essential activities, but it's not designed to encourage balance. If anything it rewards point grubbing behavior, which doesn't exactly encourage balance.

2. There are tasks that need to get done every day, which is one of missions fulfilled by the Emergent Task Planner. One minor inconvenience is the need to re-transcribe tasks that didn't get done, so I'm toying with the idea of some kind of overlay system. I actually don't mind re-transcribing tasks because it helps one be mindful of them; the act of writing is an act of mental refocusing, in other words. Still, it might be useful in some way to create sets of tasks and uses them as task lenses on any given day. This was a concept that I'd played with before for an ad agency, but it didn't really go anywhere.

3. I also like the idea of using asymmetric grids to visually convey the "otherness" of some time blocks. You can see a hint of this idea in the lower left corner of the picture. It reminds me of board games, which suggests a sense of progression from block to block. A reduction of the game board concept to an ideogram-style representation could be interesting, motivational, and highly compact.

This is the first form I'm creating that addresses balance, to my recollection. A larger issue is how all the various Printable CEO forms work with each other; how does this new balance form figure in with that? The short answer is that there is no "system" in the first place; each PCEO form tool is designed to meet a specific need. While there are ways that two or three forms could be used together, there is no unifying design philosophy at work to eliminate tedious data retranscription. This is where software may be the solution.

In the meantime, designing to encourage balance introduces a new concept in the PCEO universe, and I'm curious to see where it goes.

PowerPoint Resume Layout Tips

I know I said I was going on hiatus, but I just I got a nice email from a reader today complimenting me on the layout of the blog...thanks Janet! She also asked a question about my old online resume PDF:

In particular your resume's design caught my attention. How did you create a one-page PDF resume that's so organized and detailed? Would you be able to suggest resources or pages on how to design a PDF resume from scratch?

The short answer is that I use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, which are pricey professional page layout and document management software packages.

The longer answer is that I spent some time thinking about how I wanted people to perceive my resume and how people actually read them:

• After scanning a few hundred resumes, you start to get snow blindness from all that white. This is where graphic designers have a seeming advantage: A HAH! We can use this opportunity to uniquely express our graphical talents and creative expression! While that does work when you know you're competing against a sea of white paper, it doesn't work so well when everyone else is doing the same thing. The takeaway is a resume should be easy to read, with style in a supporting role.

• When resumes are being screened by someone who is unable to evaluate the strengths of a candidate themselves, the resume is being scanned for relevant experience and skills that match the job criteria they've been handed. It's important that these requirements are easy for them to find so your resume makes the cut.

• When resumes are being handled directly by the people that you'll be working with, they'll be scanning for signs of rare competence or interesting combinations of skills. They aren't hiring for just skills, though: they're hiring for a team fit. While you still need to address the basic requirements of the job, interjecting that curveball skill might just catch the attention of the person assembling the list of "awesome people we'd like to work with".

Most of the time, my resume isn't being processed by an HR or employee review process, but is provided as a formality, so I don't really follow the standard format. What is important, though, is that people get a sense of what skills and experience I have. The issue I have with the standard resume look is that they often have long page-width sentences (hard to read) and are filled with sentences that sound like Single-handedly managed team productivity of 50 associates through just-in-time distributed beverage ordering coordination and delivery processes. I am yawning "BS" before I even get to the word "handedly", so I cater to my own whims by using shorter descriptions in my lists of credentials. My reasoning goes something like this:

• I put all the experience "color commentary" in the "framing statement" at the top of the page, where it is placed so it is the first thing read on the page, after my name and categorical title. It should be short and to the point, serving as a kind of establishing shot, to use film lingo, for the rest of the resume.
• All the following lists of education, experience, skills, and so on then (ideally) support the framing statement. If they don't, then you are sending a mixed message about what it is you do. You may do a LOT MORE in real life, but a company is generally looking you to FIT into a particular kind of box. You might change the actual categories from what I have here to suit the type of business and industry, and if necessary add the necessary years of experience quantifiers.
• While I like to say that people should find out how to stand out rather than just fit in, the resume is one of those cases where you might want to make it easy for potential employers to IMAGINE you as a plug-and-play part in their company. That is what you are trying to sell here: possibility of a good fit, which makes it a no-brainer of a deal to get a phone call.
• When you get to the interview, your personality can then sell the other connections you can foresee. The AREAS OF INTEREST part of my resume provides potential jumping-off points for conversation.

Anyway, this is just what I do for my simple resume. I'm generally targeting the case where my resume is being considered by the creative professional for informational purposes, not competing with others as I've described above. So your mileage may vary considerably!

So, You Don't Have InDesign

In answering Janet's email, I thought about the common problem I face when telling people that I use expensive production graphics software to do my work. The implication is that THEY SHOULD TOO, though it's impractical most of the time due to the need for training and people like to use what they have available. Most of the time this is Microsoft Word or Excel. While I like Word for straight writing and basic formatting of source text, I hate its page layout tools. They are very finicky, and often times one little layout issue will cascade into an unrecoverable mess. Excel just lacks the fundamental typographic control tools, though it is surprisingly flexible.

I avoid using Microsoft FrontPage on general principle, which is that it is the source of ugly web pages that I have had to clean up. Call me small minded, but I don't even want to know what it does because of past ills visited upon me by its twisted autogenerated HTML progeny.

That leaves Microsoft PowerPoint. I occasionally have received photo assets that had been copied and pasted into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation, and this creates a production headache because the original file is down-sampled or destroyed in the process. However, I've also seen several reader-provided PowerPoint and Excel versions of my templates, and these look fine. I then idly wondered if I could use PowerPoint to recreate the layout without looking too ugly, so I gave it a try. I think it actually works. The advantage of PowerPoint over Word is that you can freely place text blocks and format them as you would in Word. You can place graphic imagery. You can also specify in PowerPoint's options to produce output aligned to the resolution of your printer, not the screen. And since PowerPoint is part of the most basic Microsoft Office suite, you probably already have it...so let's rock!

Shown below is PowerPoint 2007 duplicating my resume layout, with the "view grid" and "view rulers" options turned on to make the screenshot look more impressive:

PowerPoint allows you to set the page size of your presentation, so I set it to US Letter. Then I just drew a bunch of text boxes and aligned them in such a way that the white spaces worked together. The grid isn't particularly tight or well-constructed (in other words, it looks a little sloppy) but the overall look is fairly clean. The unit whitespace I used is the height of a line in the body text, because I didn't feel like fiddling with line heights for every paragraph. I adjusted the spaces between the headers to be greater than the blank line that separates paragraphs, and just adjusted other parts of the composition so they tended to line up cleanly where it seemed that should happen.

If I was being more anal, I would have shrunk the space between paragraphs by about 25-30% and tightened everything up proportionally...this would have improved the "scattered" look of the "education" and "experience" areas. However, this effort would have required a lot of paragraph twiddling and hey, I would have used InDesign or Illustrator for this if I were doing it for real. If you are so inclined to this kind of adjustment, though, you would select the paragraph and then right-click to choose "Format Paragraph" to play with the "space after" parameters and linespacing.

There are a couple of tricks that I had to apply to the topmost header that says DAVID SEAH.

• First, I tweaked the left margin from 0 inches to a small value to make the left edge of the D in "DAVID SEAH" line up with the type before it. If you align by the text box margins, the D does not optically line up with the left margin of the text below it ("new media designer"). In a real page layout program I would have just nudged it over, but I could not place the text box accurately enough with the mouse due to the way the program "auto-snaps" objects into alignment. Adjusting the internal margin was easier than figuring out how to turn that feature off, which I suspect is not possible.

• I opened the text box formatting options to adjust the character spacing (the default value was way too wide) by -2pt. This didn't fix the regrettable amount of space between the D and A letters (a common problem with electronic type on PCs) but it does seem more put together.

I use Acrobat Professional to create my PDF files, but I imagine there are other providers of inexpensive PDF encoders. I'm not familiar with any of them. Readers, any suggestions? [UPDATE: Several suggestions have been posted in the comments, so check them out!]

Download Example Resume Files

If you'd like to play with your own version of this resume, just download the zip file which contains the PowerPoint 2007 source. I've also enclosed a version that should work with PowerPoint 2005 versions and earlier, though I'm not sure if it works. A sample PDF is also included for your reference. Please note that this is not my actual resume, though it is using elements from it.

» Download PPTResumeSample.zip (170K)
» Requires Microsoft PowerPoint

Note: If you are looking for Calibri, the font that I'm using here, it's part of Office 2007. You can download and install the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to get them; check this article for some tips on other options.

NOTE: There have been some really great reader comments for this article; you should definitely check them out! :-)