Creative CV Briefing

Live Brief for Caris Etherington.

Caris is a student at Leeds Beckett study a BA(Hons) in Events Management. She has recently been invited to a conference in London hosted by a guest lecture who visited Leeds Beckett. Caris was the only person to ask a question and the guest speaker to her to one side and invited her to this opportunity in London, but her advice to her was to bring business cards and update her CV to be a creative CV. The lady given this advice gave her a strict layout on what to put on her Business card and told her to see what she could come up with, regarding her CV. The problem is Caris has no confidence in her creativity and struggles with computer proficiency in designing. Therefore she has asked me to fulfil the task for her.

I spent a good few hours sat down with her, and agreed to do it on the premise I could use it as a live brief. I also think this research and practice will benefit my practice and it will provide practice for when I come to do my own, and I’ll already have some knowledge regarding the subject. 

So first things first the brief requires a Creative Cv:

The guest speaker recommended Caris’ had a quote that resonates with her or a statement that would make her card memorable. Also enlarged it should have her name, Ba(Hons) Event Management Leeds Beckett UK Center for Events Management. Also her linkedin, twitter and email.

Then on her creative CV this took much longer to pull out what’s required, Caris has a lot of related experience, so I started with this, her education and some interests. She also decided she wanted her quote on the update CV.  Now the only thing she really knew is that she want’s it to be a brand iconic selection and she wants the colour purple (we went through so many purples to pick the right one) to be the main theme. She also thought about having diamonds, but doesn’t want to come across too superficial so I said I’d go for more hexagonal diamond esque shapes. We went through pinterest, creativebloq, and some other articles of creative CV’s and I went through my career track tuesday session on creative CV’s with her. And because she wants to get into creative event planning more than the business side, creative CV’s are more popular than they are in the creative industries, which kind of shocked me, but I imagine it’s easier to stand out if you have a decent creative CV because you’re not actually against a whole load of other creatives. One thing that Caris noted when looking at the other CV’s is how fussy american ones are because you have to fit so much information onto one side, and she wants to go for simple and elegant. To fit in with this we also looked at a whole range of fonts, my personal favourite is Mohave but she thought it was a bit too masculine, she really likes the rounder fonts that are more traditional, like glamor and Forum, and midway one we both liked was Simplifica. So I’m going to come up with a couple of different alternative ones in the different fonts. 

We then spent a long time going through her skills gained from each work/volunteer experience and the key points she’d want on this CV, because at the end of the day the reason she needs to take her CV to this conference is because there will be people there that she wants to impress to gain placements and work experience from. Because I know her pretty well, I was able to help her pick the best ones, in the end we went for five, which although this means a lot of information has to be put on the CV it shows a really good depth of the industry. And at the end of the day her education results aren't brilliant but her experience really is so this is what we want to highlight.

After this we went through a whole host of quotes and relating to london fashion week and her work in retail we came across this one by Armani she settled on: Elegance is not standing out but being remembered. 

I think this one is perfect before her, because she doesn't stand out but she is always remembered. We found a few others but they weren't people you’d specifically want to quote.

So the deliverables I really want to focus on is making it clean and professional looking, it doesn't have to look super creative, it just has to look better than average as in the Event's industry people aren't expected to be creative so they have a much lower appreciation of what looks good, which is why people with these CV's stand out a lot more. I've tried doing my own creative CV but it just get's me worked up and upset because I get really perfectionist about it and I get worked up. So I think this will be easier to do because I'm really indecisive and Caris will be able to give me lots of minute changes and pointers to get it right.