Becoming the creative director of an artistic marketing department is the end goal for many people pursuing art direction. As an art director, you’ll often use the fine arts to help with marketing initiatives, combining beauty and sales in a seamless manner. This is difficult, and if you’re applying for an art director job, then you’ll be expected to show that you can do it. Here’s how to craft a professional resume as an art director.
One of the most important elements to emphasize in your art director resume is that you’re good at teamwork. As a senior art director, you’re not just working with a creative team. You’re working with people from all across a marketing team, from social media experts to photographers, web developers and beyond. Pulling the entire team together is what makes you a great art director.
Most of the time, an art director resume sample will follow the chronological resume format. It relies primarily on your work history, which is what will typically create the best resume for an art director. Here are the headings you’re likely to see as an art director.
A resume header should include your full name and contact information, with your phone number, address and email address. As an art director, you want to include the link to your portfolio or website in addition to links to any job networking profiles such as LinkedIn.
The first section on a resume will typically be the resume summary or resume objective. This is a two or three sentence paragraph that summarizes everything in the resume. It’s positioned at the top of the resume so a hiring manager can see it at a glance. A resume objective focuses less on work experience and instead provides an objective that you’re hoping to accomplish with the resume and your career.
Your skills section is where you can really show off what you’re good at. Here are a few bullet points a recruiter is probably looking for:
These skills can all be important for the design projects you’re working on. An art director resume, likely more than most, needs both hard skills and soft skills to succeed.
Your work experience section should include up to ten years of experience in this and related fields, or more if specifically asked. Include any experience you’ve had regarding art direction in marketing, including heading creative teams when your job title wasn’t specifically related to art direction.
In your education section, include any college degrees or certifications that you have. Most of the time, you need to have at least a bachelor’s degree to become an art director. However, if you have higher degrees than that, be sure to highlight that information in this section as well.
You should include a cover letter for all applications. A cover letter allows you to talk directly to the hiring manager about the job, request the job interview directly and elaborate on anything you didn’t get to cover in-depth in your resume. If you’re looking for a great cover letter for an art director application, then use the ResumeNerd cover letter builder to create one.
Art directors do need a lot of experience. If you’re just breaking into art directing, and this is the first time you’ve ever applied to be an art director, then include experience from all jobs in related fields. This may include marketing campaign jobs, general project management jobs and art-related jobs in fields like graphic design. This is an important part of creating an effective art director resume.
When you apply to more than one job with your art director resume, you need to change it a bit so that you’re targeting the specific job posting you’re applying to. The best way to do this is with resume keywords. Scan the job description for job requirements and skills that could be matched as resume keywords to include in your resume. That way, you’ll meet the requirements that the hiring manager is looking for in that specific job role.
