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As a senior graphic designer, your experience lets you manage design projects and teams to deliver high-quality digital communication when it counts.
You’ve created your portfolio with blood, sweat, and tears and honed your craft through countless visual media campaigns. We exaggerate, but landing your next role doesn’t have to be an endless slog when there are cool tools like a resume maker and cover letter generator at your disposal.
Let us help you with our senior graphic designer resume examples and guide. Choose from our professional resume templates and take a page from our tips to be on your way!
Why this resume works
- Planning to stand out from a hundred (and mind you, experienced) graphic designers by simply showing off your achievements? Think again. That’s going to be everyone’s game plan.
- Release the same creative juices you’ve created a career out of in your senior graphic designer resume. Show steady growth in your position, with each role having slightly better feats than the last one to present an authentic yet assertive journey.
What Matters Most: Skills & Work Experience
At the senior level, graphic designers are expected to have about five to six years of experience with a robust portfolio showcasing past work. You know you have the skills to make it work; this section is where you’ll list the tools of your trade.
In your resume, tell the reader how your expertise in design software, management, and communication contributed to your current career trajectory.
Here are some of the most popular skills recruiters are looking for in senior graphic designer roles.
9 most popular senior graphic designer skills
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Concept pitching
- CorelDRAW
- Graphic techniques
- InVision proficiency
- Prototyping
- Visual element expertise
- Advertising composition
- Copywriting
Sample senior graphic designer work experience bullet points
Senior graphic designers are often put in charge of visual media staff like junior graphic designers. Your work experience bullet points should show not just your technical skills put into practice but also any instances where you led a team or managed a project.
Whenever possible, mix it up with some concrete, measurable examples like figures and performance metrics, as these will help add more perspective to your achievements.
Here are a few samples:
- Worked collaboratively with the marketing team to design and print a new brochure for the California area, which was sent to over 30,000 potential customers and generated a 4% response rate
- Hired a junior graphic designer and videographer, and oversaw the onboarding for the team of 3
- Re-designed FDA-compliant product labels for 7 products, including graphics and layouts, which resulted in 10% more sales by volume
- Created a witty marketing brochure that was displayed in over 400 stores across the country and received a small viral response (500+ likes) on Facebook
Top 5 Tips for Your Senior Graphic Designer Resume
- Keep your resume to one page unless you have more than 10 years of experience
- Just like how you would tweak a design to best suit its target audience, good resumes help the reader focus on how you’re a good fit for the role. Highlight relevant and important points like how you created an asset database for the marketing team, simplifying the creative process, and saving the department four hours a week. Your resume can go up to two pages if you have more than 10 years of experience.
- Consider getting a certification to boost your resume (or list it if you already have one)
- Chances are, you already have a strong portfolio that showcases your skills and plenty of work experience to boot. Something like a Project Management Professional certification may seem unrelated at first, but it can help inspire confidence in your ability to manage projects and people as a senior graphic designer.
- Use the reverse-chronological format for your resume to highlight your experience
- Presenting your resume in a way that features what the reader wants to know is the best way to go, just like emphasis in design principles. In your case, that’s your years of work experience as a senior graphic designer. The reverse-chronological format puts your most relevant and recent experience first, so recruiters can quickly find out whether you’re suited to the role.
- Keep specific and relevant job description requirements at the top of your resume sections
- Not all design skills are created equal – while proficiency in the Adobe Creative Cloud works for most roles, some organizations need specific skills like Blender proficiency, HTML/CSS, or WordPress. List the skills required in the job description first and edit your work experience bullet points to match the language used, so the recruiter knows that you share the same priorities as they do.
- Showcase your industry achievements in your career summary
- We don’t always recommend adding a career summary as you’ll need the real estate for skills and work experience, but if you have an outstanding achievement to highlight, this is where you’ll do it.
- Here’s an example: “Innovative and passionate senior graphic designer with 11+ years of experience in creative design where my team and I were shortlisted for the Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design in 2021. Looking forward to applying this same zest for artistic design coupled with my proficiency in visual aesthetic and intuitive design at Pavement.”
- We don’t always recommend adding a career summary as you’ll need the real estate for skills and work experience, but if you have an outstanding achievement to highlight, this is where you’ll do it.
Your resume should be addressed to the hiring manager or the recruiter responsible for the job posting. Depending on the industry, you can also address it to the Director of Marketing, the Design Director, or the Creative Team Lead. Be sure to address the person by name!
In a pinch, any work experience you have in creating design solutions will do—if you can further illustrate how these projects adhered to marketing strategies and business goals, that’s a plus.
You should also emphasize instances where you made decisions or managed junior staff members, as that will showcase your abilities in management and overseeing work.
The best graphic designers can work well on their own as well as on a team. They’re also flexible and adaptable, with a consistent creative flow and deft communication ability. If possible, all of these should go into your work experience bullet points with practical examples, as your skills section will most likely be occupied with specific design skills.
