Creative · Single column · ATS 2/5
Art Director CV template
An editorial spread: dark masthead, bleeding photo, titles hung in the margin.
A creative CV is itself a work sample: the person reading it is judging craft before they open your portfolio, and this layout is built to be looked at as well as read. One column, with a place for a photograph that the layout closes up cleanly when you decide not to use one.
Live preview of the Art Director template, rendered at full page size with an example CV. The preview is the same code that generates your PDF.
The design
About the Art Director layout
Who it’s for
The readers and situations this layout was drawn for.
- Art directors and creative leads
- Editorial, fashion and advertising roles
- Senior creatives with a short, tightly edited CV
Key features
What is actually different about this template on the page.
- Full-bleed masthead with reversed-out name
- Photo bleeding to the right page edge
- Section titles hung in a 7em left margin
- Hairline rules and generous whitespace
ATS score 2/5 · Limited
How this layout behaves in an applicant tracking system
Two out of five, and that is a deliberate trade. The composition — framing, centring, generous negative space — is the whole point of the design, and it is exactly what a parser strips away.
Sections stack in a single flow, so the order you set in the editor is the order the parser records: summary, then experience, then education, then whatever you put next.
The portrait is an image, so no parser reads it, and a handful of large employers’ systems flag documents that contain images at all. Switching the photo off in the editor takes one click and the layout closes up around it.
Use this one where a person opens the file: a direct approach, a studio, an agent, a client, a networking introduction. For anything uploaded to a careers portal, build a second version from the ATS CV templates — the same content, a layout that survives extraction, and no need to write anything twice.
- Reading order
- Single flow
- Headings
- Real text
- Tables
- None
- Images
- Photo only, optional
- Selectable text
- Yes
Scores are our own assessment of how a parser handles the layout — never a guarantee about one specific employer’s system.
In practice
Three situations Art Director is the right answer to
A gallery, residency or commission
The people reading this are not running keyword screens. They are looking for taste, coherence and a body of work — which is what this composition is built to present. The obvious case: Art directors and creative leads.
A portfolio in document form
Everything runs in one column, so a long list of projects and commissions keeps the sequence you chose — and the sequencing is part of the edit when the reader is a creative director.
An agent, gallery or representation submission
Representation is a personal relationship, and the submission is read as one. A composed page with a portrait belongs in that conversation in a way a plain text CV does not. If the employer asks for a document without one, the photo toggle in the editor removes it and Art Director re-balances the header on its own.
Make it yours
Customising Art Director
Accent colour
Art Director ships with #0f172a as its accent. The accent is doing visible design work, so choose it deliberately: pull it from your portfolio site or your personal identity rather than accepting a default. One strong colour beats two competing ones on a page this expressive.
Fonts and heading style
A display or editorial face for headings over a quiet body face is the pairing this layout is drawn around. Let one voice lead — setting both at high contrast is what turns an art-directed CV into a noisy one. Heading case — uppercase, capitalised or as typed — is a separate switch, and it changes the character of the page more than most people expect.
Spacing and density
Three sliders control density — type size, line height and the gap between sections — and on a one-column page each of them affects the whole document evenly, so fitting two pages into one is a matter of small adjustments rather than deletions.
Sections and order
Projects, awards and links carry more weight than a long employment history. If the work itself is your strongest argument, move projects above experience — it takes one drag in the editor. Every section can be renamed, reordered or hidden, and Pro adds custom sections for anything the standard set does not cover.
Photo
The portrait can be circular, rounded or square, and it can be switched off entirely — the header reflows rather than leaving a hole, so one CV serves both a market that expects a photograph and one that does not.
Paper size and export
Switch between A4 and US Letter and the document re-flows to the new page instead of being scaled into it. The exported PDF is rendered from the same component as the preview, so nothing shifts between the screen and the file.
Art Director: common questions
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Keep exploring
- All creative templatesEvery design in the Creative family, side by side.
- One-column templatesThe full single-column range, across all six categories.
- CV templatesFormats, page counts and conventions by country and career stage.
- ATS CV templatesWhat a parser does with your file, and the layouts built to survive it.
- CV examplesWorked examples by role, with the wording and structure explained.
- Pricing and plansWhat Pro unlocks, and how the one-off Lifetime plan compares.
Start your CV with Art Director
Open it with the example content already in place, replace it with your own, and download a PDF when it reads the way you want. Switching to another template later keeps every word you have written.
Free to start. A Pro or Lifetime plan unlocks this design and every other one.