Creativity

50 Shades Of Resume #1: The Progress Graph

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Resume 1

So what’s our first resume? It’s this graph of progress by Branko Yamasaki, a combination of a regular resume and a graphical display of his career growth and skill usage.

Brako’s resume is a skills-based info graphic that shows how he’s improved in his skills over the years (and in a few cases, like Ruby, just sort of let the skill go), and where he used them. It’s a single-page hit of information that focuses on what he’s done, learned, and where.

The High Points of this resume-chart are:

  • Strong use of visual space to portray skills, progress, and where he worked.
  • Surprisingly keeping everything on one page.
  • Shows a definite sense of growth and progress in a compelling way.
  • It’s humanized – Branko’s smiling face and extra comments on the left bar personalize what could be an otherwise effective but ultimately not “human” graph.
  • Demonstrates his graphical talents.
  • It’s clever, in that a lot is actually done with visual space and elements to communicate.

The limits of this graph-resume are:

  • It’s definitely going to choke a scanning system. This is a resume to send to people or put in a portfolio to impress them, not send to any position on a message board.
  • It may get more crowded over time and need to be rethought.
  • It may need to be rethought if any career changes occur.
  • The left column is indispensable to keep the human side, limiting space available.

Steve’s Summary: If this came across my desk, I’d be intrigued, especially if Branko was applying for a data-visualization heavy job, and I’d like the honesty on his skills.  I also like the fact I have a feel for his personality.

[“50 Shades of Resume” is an analysis of various interesting resumes to celebrate the launch of the second edition of my book “Fan To Pro” and to give our readers inspiration for their own unique creations.]

– Steven Savage

Way With Worlds: Creating Religion Is Hard

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Church Ruins

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum, MuseHack, and Ongoing Worlds]

So let’s talk about creating and writing religions in your world. You may now start panicking.

Creating religions is challenging,as we all know. That sense of challenge, the burden, the awareness of all the effort it takes can bring us down in our world building efforts. Chances are even mention this is giving you flashbacks.

So before we explore writing religions and creating religions, I want to cover the challenges we world builders face – and discuss overcoming them. Will I cover all possible cases? No theres only so much I can do or remember, swear to . . .

. . . er anyway, lets’ go on and look a some of the challenges facing writing religion and common traps.

But First . . .

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Way With Worlds: Finding Inspiration

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Viewing Device

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum, MuseHack, and Ongoing Worlds]

We’ve all had those moments where we’re just not inspired to build our world – or in writing in general. Other times we’re inspired but it’s actually not coming together, which is somehow worse. I imagine many a writer feels they exist inside a permanent form of writer’s block from which they escape only momentarily until their lack of creative forces drag them back to their prison.

With “World Blockage” it’s exceptionally daunting because worldbuilding is a complex process. A single idea or clever exercise may not spawn new continents or languages. An hour of effort may yield little results because the parts just won’t come together. It’s just as maddening as writer’s block, and you need something to jumpstart it.

You need inspiration – inspiration to build worlds.

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