A designer is hired on the portfolio. The CV exists to get the portfolio opened and to answer the questions the portfolio cannot: how big the team was, who you worked with, what constraints you designed inside, and how decisions were actually made.
That means a design CV should be unusually plain. Elaborate layouts on a designer’s CV tend to work against them, partly because recruiters read them in a tracking system that strips the design out, and partly because restraint is itself a signal.
This example is written for a product designer with around six years of experience working on a subscription product.
Opens in the editor with this content already filled in, so you can replace it with your own.
Profile
Product designer with six years on subscription and marketplace products. Recent work includes a cancellation flow redesign that reduced churn by around 11%, and a 60-component design system now used by all six squads. Comfortable running research, not just interpreting it.
Professional Experience
Senior Product DesignerJanuary 2022 – Present
Perch Media Subscriptions · London, United Kingdom
•Ran 14 moderated usability sessions on the cancellation flow, which showed most users could not find the pause option; surfacing it reduced cancellations by around 11% over the following quarter.
•Built and documented a 60-component Figma library with tokens shared with the engineering Storybook, and ran adoption sessions that took usage from two squads to all six in a quarter.
•Led accessibility remediation across the account area to WCAG 2.2 AA, including a rewrite of the payment form error handling.
•Facilitate fortnightly critique for a design team of five, and mentor two junior designers.
Figma · Maze · Storybook
Product DesignerJune 2019 – December 2021
Hollowfield Marketplace · Brighton, United Kingdom
•Redesigned seller onboarding from a nine-step form into a four-step flow with saved progress, which took completion from 41% to 68%.
•Introduced a monthly research cadence: six interviews a month with sellers, summarised in a shared repository the product team still uses.
•Worked directly with two engineers through build on every feature, which removed the separate handover stage entirely.
Figma · Sketch · Dovetail
Selected Projects
Subscription pause and cancellation
Lead designer
•Research, interaction design and rollout of a redesigned cancellation journey for around 300,000 subscribers.
•Cancellations fell by roughly 11% in the quarter after launch, with no increase in support contacts.
Perch design system
Owner
•60 components with tokens, documentation and adoption programme across six product squads.
Education
BA (Hons) Graphic DesignSeptember 2015 – June 2018
University of Brighton · Brighton, United Kingdom
First Class Honours
UI/UX Designer example on the Elegant Two Column layout. All details are fictional and shown for demonstration only.
What recruiters expect
Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:
A portfolio link that works, at the top, with a password included if it is protected.
Research method described specifically: how many participants, what type of study, what you learned that surprised you.
Evidence that your designs shipped, and what happened to the metric afterwards.
Design system work - components, tokens, documentation, and how you got other people to use it.
Collaboration detail: working with engineers, running critiques, handling disagreement about a decision.
Recommended CV structure
This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.
Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
Skills & Tools — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
Professional Experience — Paid roles, in reverse chronological order.
Selected Projects — Selected pieces with links.
Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
Certifications — Completed certifications with the issuing body.
Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.
Sections worth adding
Community — Mentoring and design community work read well for senior and lead roles.
Awards — Only for recognised industry awards, and only with the year and category.
Skills worth including
Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.
Design
Figma · Interaction design · Information architecture · Prototyping · Design systems
HTML & CSS reading level · Analytics review · Copywriting for interfaces
Beyond the technical list: Presenting to stakeholders, Defending a decision with evidence, Facilitation, Mentoring junior designers. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.
Example professional summary
Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:
Product designer with six years on subscription and marketplace products. Recent work includes a cancellation flow redesign that reduced churn by around 11%, and a 60-component design system now used by all six squads. Comfortable running research, not just interpreting it.
Product designer with a research-led practice and a habit of shipping. Six years across two SaaS products, including accessibility remediation to WCAG 2.2 AA and design system ownership.
Writing your experience
The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.
Weak
Conducted user research to inform designs.
Stronger
Ran 14 moderated usability sessions on the subscription cancellation flow, which showed that most users could not find the pause option; adding it reduced cancellations by around 11% over the following quarter.
Names the method, the sample, the finding and the consequence.
Weak
Created a design system.
Stronger
Built and documented a 60-component Figma library with tokens shared with the engineering Storybook, and ran adoption sessions that took usage from two squads to all six within a quarter.
Design systems fail on adoption, not on creation. This addresses the hard half.
Weak
Worked closely with developers.
Stronger
Paired with engineers during build on the new onboarding flow, adjusting two interactions after seeing the performance cost of the original animation approach.
A specific collaborative decision, including a compromise, which is more convincing than an assertion of teamwork.
Taken from the example
The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:
Experience
Senior Product Designer, Perch Media Subscriptions
Ran 14 moderated usability sessions on the cancellation flow, which showed most users could not find the pause option; surfacing it reduced cancellations by around 11% over the following quarter.
Built and documented a 60-component Figma library with tokens shared with the engineering Storybook, and ran adoption sessions that took usage from two squads to all six in a quarter.
Led accessibility remediation across the account area to WCAG 2.2 AA, including a rewrite of the payment form error handling.
Facilitate fortnightly critique for a design team of five, and mentor two junior designers.
Education
BA (Hons) Graphic Design, University of Brighton — First Class Honours
Certifications and registration
Foundations of UX Research — Nielsen Norman Group
Common mistakes
A CV that competes with the portfolio
Heavy layout, colour blocks and icon grids make the CV harder to read and are usually stripped anyway. Save the craft for the case studies.
Process described in the abstract
"Discover, define, ideate, deliver" is on thousands of CVs. What did you discover, and what changed because of it?
No outcomes
Designs that shipped and moved a number are the strongest evidence available. If the number is not public, use the direction and the scale.
Portfolio behind an unexplained password
If it is protected, put the password on the CV. A reviewer will not email to ask for it.
ATS considerations
Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to ui/ux designer applications:
Include "UX designer", "UI designer" and "product designer" across the document, because employers use all three for the same job.
Keep the CV to a plain single column. Multi-column design CVs are frequently parsed out of order.
Put the portfolio URL as plain text, not as an icon or an image link.
Name the research methods; "user research" alone matches less well than "usability testing" and "user interviews".
The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.
Questions about ui/ux designer CVs
Should my CV be visually designed?
Keep it clean and typographic rather than decorative. Applicant tracking systems mangle multi-column design CVs, and reviewers judge your visual skill from the portfolio regardless.
How long should a design CV be?
One page for up to about eight years, two after that. The portfolio carries the depth; the CV carries the context.
What if I cannot share my work publicly?
Describe the problem, your role and the outcome in words, and offer to walk through the work in the interview. Many enterprise designers are in this position and reviewers understand it.
Do I need to be able to code?
Not to write production code, but reading HTML and CSS and understanding component boundaries makes handover much better and is worth listing honestly at the level you have it.