I’m excited to announce the reason behind my recent blog silence – I’ve been busy working on my latest Skillshare class: Designing Professional Documents. I like to think of it as “making boring documents beautiful.” A well designed document can change how a client perceives you and make you stand out from the competition, not to mention, make it easier for the reader to digest the content.

All Skillshare classes are project driven and the assignment for this class is to redesign your résumé, a document everyone has. I was inspired by my friend Zoe who asked me to help her with her CV, when I realized it’d make more sense to teach her a few skills that she can apply to any document, rather than me making the changes for her. I share this example in class, along with many more. One of my favorite units is when I share documents – résumés, cover letters, proposals, invoices and more – from many of my favorite professional designers in the field. There is such a thing as “over-design” but these examples show the perfect balance between content and design. Then I walk through various concepts to help you redesign your own résumé with a style of your own.

I intentionally structured the class in a way so anyway can apply the skills regardless of what software you’re using. I review the concepts, followed by a lesson where I use InDesign to showcase the tools in action. For those that are interested in building skills in InDesign, this class is for beginner/intermediate level and will give you a lot of practice working with text.

As always, anyone can sign up for Skillshare classes any time, and once you’re in a class you have lifetime access. All lessons are pre-recorded online so you can watch them as many times as you want. Students are encouraged to share their work in the classroom and participate in class discussion boards. It’s a really wonderful experience. (Trust me, I’ve taken 30 classes now!)

I’ve created short links to make it easier to sign up (or share) all three of my classes:

• Map Design:: bitly.com/makemaps
• Intro to InDesign:: bitly.com/learnindesign
• Designing Professional Documents:: bitly.com/resumeredesign

If you have any questions about any of my classes, ask in the comments below!

P.S. Code BORING will get you $5 off Designing Professional Documents when you sign up through the referral links in this post!

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