The lettering that gives a poster its energy may be the wrong lettering for the dates beside your last job. A portfolio and a CV can share a visual identity without presenting a project title, an employment date and a contact address in the same way.

BratGen’s browser-based graphic tool offers controls for text, colour, font size and blur; its blog also explores stylish text and generated cover designs. These are useful starting points for thinking about visual expression. An application raises a different question: where does that expression demonstrate your ability, and where does it obscure the information needed to assess you?

The answer is not to remove design from your CV or to make your portfolio a gallery with no explanation. Give each document a distinct job, then make them work together.

Give the two documents different jobs

A CV should establish what you have done and why it is relevant: your roles, organisations or clients, dates, responsibilities, education and applicable skills. Make contact details and the route to your portfolio easy to find. Here, CV means the career summary requested for a job application, rather than a comprehensive academic record.

A portfolio should let someone examine the work behind those statements. A finished image shows an output; a case study can show the brief, audience, constraints, alternatives, revisions and your particular contribution. The CV might establish that you designed an event identity. The portfolio should make it possible to judge how that identity worked across a poster, a small graphic and supporting copy.

Neither document should depend on the other to supply a missing basic fact. Do not make a reviewer open a project just to discover whether you were the designer or the editor. Equally, do not assume that a portfolio visitor has already read your CV. Label student work, volunteer work and self-initiated concepts clearly in both places.

Put expressive design where it explains the work

A generated graphic can introduce a case study, establish a campaign’s tone or sit beside alternative treatments to show what you considered. Expressive typography can be part of the work under discussion: a deliberately compressed headline, an oversized word or a textured title treatment may have a clear creative purpose.

Keep the explanation around that work dependable. A visitor should not need to decode a distorted heading to discover the project name, your role or the brief. Place essential context in ordinary text outside the artwork. A dramatic cover is more useful when the next screen explains what the viewer is looking at.

On a CV, use spacing, alignment, a restrained accent colour and a clear type hierarchy to create character. Keep names, job titles, dates and contact details out of decorative image treatments. For essential wording, use normal letters with font formatting rather than turning the words into artwork.

Be precise about authorship, too. When a generator supplies a starting image or text treatment, distinguish that contribution from your own layout, editing, art direction or production work. Selecting and adapting an output can be part of a process; it is not the same claim as creating every component from scratch.

Write the career information before styling it

Build each experience entry around a recognisable role, its context and a consistent date range. Use the title you actually held. Where an internal title is vague, add a truthful functional explanation rather than promoting yourself to a more senior role. “Design assistant — social graphics” communicates more than an unexplained slogan such as “creative force”.

Then describe the work with an action, a deliverable and enough context to establish its scope. “Prepared captioned product videos for a weekly launch schedule” is more assessable than “passionate about engaging content”. State whether you planned, filmed, edited, wrote or approved the work; those are different contributions.

Use evidence that you can explain. A completed set of assets, a documented revision or an editable handover package may be worth describing even when you have no performance figures. Add numbers only when they are accurate and attributable. Do not turn a team’s results into your individual achievement or invent a percentage because the layout has room for one.

Make the information accessible, not merely visible

Keep essential CV content as selectable text rather than a screenshot of a designed page. After exporting, try selecting your name, copying an experience entry and searching for a distinctive phrase. Inspect what comes out: a file can look orderly while copied text arrives in a confusing sequence. Treat this as a useful diagnostic, not a complete accessibility or recruitment-system test.

Microsoft’s guidance, “Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities,” recommends built-in heading styles and a logical heading order. Apply those styles to clear labels such as Experience, Education and Projects, rather than simply making a line bold and large. In a web portfolio, use the corresponding heading structure, not just text that looks like a heading.

Contrast needs attention in the supporting text as much as in the artwork. For body text on a web portfolio, W3C’s WCAG 2.2 Contrast (Minimum) criterion sets a 4.5:1 minimum; qualifying large text has a 3:1 threshold. These are contrast requirements, not proof that an entire site or document is accessible. Keep captions and dates readable instead of fading them to make the page look cleaner.

For meaningful portfolio images, provide alternative text that explains their purpose, supported by nearby captions where more detail is needed. Keep the project brief and your role available as text rather than embedding them only inside a mock-up. Microsoft’s accessibility guidance also recommends meaningful link wording: “View the exhibition identity case study” gives a clearer destination than “click here”.

Treat recruiting-system compatibility as a check, not a promise

Applicant tracking systems vary. A useful example is Greenhouse’s resume-parsing guidance, which describes how its software extracts information into candidate fields. It identifies graphics, image-based resumes, columns, complex tables and contact details placed in headers or text boxes as possible causes of parsing problems.

Importantly, the same guidance explains that a resume can remain attached to a candidate record even when parsing fails and details need manual entry. An extraction problem is not, by itself, evidence of an automatic hiring rejection. Nor does this documentation establish that every recruiting system handles creative layouts in the same way.

A straightforward, single-column CV is a sensible starting point when you do not know the receiving system. That is a practical precaution, not a universal requirement. Follow the application’s stated file types and size limits, and check any fields populated after upload. Neither a PDF nor a Word file guarantees correct extraction, acceptance or an interview.

One project, two presentations: a hypothetical example

The following student exhibition project is entirely hypothetical. Its name, dates, role and deliverables are invented to illustrate presentation, not to describe a real applicant, event or result.

The concise CV entry

Volunteer Graphic Designer | Open Studio student exhibition | March–April 2026

Created one event poster and three social graphics; developed the typographic layout, revised event information with the organisers, and supplied editable files alongside final exports.

This entry establishes the role, period, scope and contribution. It does not need a miniature poster, a skill-rating bar or an unsupported claim about attendance.

The richer portfolio presentation

Open with a clear title: “Open Studio: adapting an exhibition identity for different sizes.” Explain that the brief was to give the student exhibition a recognisable visual style while keeping the event information easy to locate. Identify the volunteer role and distinguish the designer’s work from the organisers’ event planning.

Show an early title treatment and the final layout together. In this hypothetical case, a generator supplied an initial blurred text graphic. The designer explored that treatment for the exhibition name, then kept the date and location in a separate, plainly styled information block. Explain why the more expressive treatment was suitable for the name but not for the practical details.

Next, show how the poster was adapted into the three social graphics. Annotate a crop or spacing change rather than displaying four unexplained mock-ups. Include a detail view and the full composition so the reader can assess both the typography and its context.

Close with an honest outcome: the specified assets and editable files were delivered. No audience or attendance measurement is claimed. The portfolio offers evidence of decisions and finished work; it does not manufacture a business result to make the project seem more important.

Check the final application in four passes

First, check the facts and the connection

Read the vacancy alongside your CV. Make relevant experience easy to locate without adding skills you do not have. Then compare the CV with the portfolio: dates, project names, roles and descriptions should agree. Ensure that the work you are submitting is yours to share, and remove confidential details. Where a case study illustrates a CV claim, give it a recognisable matching title.

Second, check the reading experience

Ask another reader to find your latest role, a relevant skill and a project demonstrating that skill. In the portfolio, ask them to explain what you contributed without prompting. A wrong answer can reveal a labelling problem rather than a lack of work. Check the portfolio on a phone and with enlarged text; look for cropped information, awkward navigation and captions that disappear into the design.

Third, check the exported files

Review the file you will actually send, not just the editor preview. Microsoft’s “Create accessible PDFs” guidance advises running the source document’s Accessibility Checker and retaining accessibility tags during PDF export. Tags carry structural information for assistive technology; selecting text alone does not establish that the structure is correct.

Open the export in another viewer. Inspect every page for changed line breaks, missing characters, detached dates and clipped text. Repeat the selection and copy test, check links, and review accessibility warnings in the tools available to you. After any correction, export again and check the replacement—not an older copy.

An optional review aid is Astr’s CV assessment tool, which accepts a PDF and provides a score with improvement suggestions. Treat that feedback as a prompt to inspect the CV, not a result from an employer’s system or a prediction of an interview. A manual review remains essential.

Fourth, check the submission as the recipient

Use a clear filename, select the requested format and inspect any upload preview or automatically filled fields. Open the portfolio link while signed out to check its permissions. Remove accidental account barriers and supply any intentionally required access instructions through the application’s permitted channel. Confirm that the linked version is the one whose projects and dates you just checked.

A strong application does not ask one document to do everything. Let the CV make your experience easy to assess, and let the portfolio make your creative decisions available for examination. Using different design rules is not a retreat from creativity. It is a way to show that you can design for the reader’s task.