Create a Standout Visual Résumé with Visual Thinking

1. Class Trailer: Hi, I'm Catherine Madden and I am a visual thinking consultant and data visualization designer. If you've taken my other sculpture classes, you know that I'm a huge proponent of the power of visual thinking and visual storytelling. In this class, I'm hoping to put some of those theories to practical use by helping you create a standout visual resume. We've all avoided updating our resume for a reason. It sucks. It's really hard to think about ways to glorify some areas of your work experience to make them seem better than they were. It's also hard to get creative and it's hard to know if you're going to cross the line between what's an acceptable format and content. But what if it can be fun and relatively easy? In this 30-minute course, we'll break down the traditional resume into simple charts, but we'll also go a little deeper and get more creative with different content and formats. We'll start by drawing, but I'll also show you ways that you can create hand-drawn charts on the iPad or computer generated charts on your laptop. The class project is to create at least one chart that can replace one of the more boring parts of your resume. You could embed this chart into your resume to help you stand out in a crowd or you could just use it to help get more clarity on where you want to go with your career. You could use it to communicate to your boss why you deserve a raise, or you could just use it to tell your mom what you do for a living. I will help you decide which visualization formats and content will work best for you but I also hope that you bring some of your own ideas. I can't wait to see what you come up with. 2. Class Project: For the class project, I want you to submit at least one chart that tells an interesting story about you. Each of the lessons will be an opportunity to create a chart building up from a shitty first draft to something a little bit more polished. Everyone will have different ideas for what you want to say and how you want to say it so I'll provide you with a bunch of different examples for more traditional and more creative formats and it'll be up to you to decide which one you go with. The formats that I'm going to walk you through are; a hand-drawn charts on paper, a hand-drawn chart on an iPad, a computer-generated chart using Google Sheets, and an interactive chart using Tableau Public. Even though there's four options for the format, I want you to start with the first two, or at least the first one which is hand drawn on paper. It's important to do this part in hand drawing, even if you're uncomfortable or you're not an artist and you feel you're not good at drawing. It's really not about how it looks and how pretty it is and how clean it looks. It's about getting your ideas from your head onto a piece of paper without being distracted by PowerPoint or inspiration on the Internet. It's really just in personal, meditative thought process that you get through drawing on paper. There are several considerations to keep in mind when deciding how to tell your visual story. The first one is content. What do you want to say and how you want to say it? The second one is your audience. Who are you talking to and how do they like to receive information? The third one is format. Sometimes it's absolutely necessary to create a PDF in the standard eight-and-a-half by 11 black and white and other times you can get more creative and do something that has maybe a static image that you post to your website or blog to supplement your more traditional resume. Keep these things in mind as we go through the lessons. 3. Warming Up with SFDs (Shitty First Drafts): Now we're going to move into our shitty first drafts. Like I mentioned before, updating your resume is no fun. So I'm hoping this exercise is really helpful in getting the creative juices flowing and having a little bit of fun in the process. Keep in mind that creativity is all about quantity over quality. So if you set a timer right now and do as many things as possible in five minutes, you'll have an easier time finding one idea that is actually really good. Before you go into the details of the exercise, I want to show you a few examples to help you see exactly what type of detail and what type of quality drawing I'm looking for in this exercise. These are all visualizations created on index cards by people in the audience at different speaking engagements that I've given. I asked them to spend five minutes creating a rough sketch and then submit them to Twitter so we can all look at them at the end of the talk. The first quick sketch is an index card that has my homes over time created by someone who wanted to just show where they lived over the past few years. So they've got their house in Richmond, Buckingham, and then D. C. You've got a timeline and you can see the scale of the different buildings. The second one is an artistic medium journey, starting from what I assume to be early in life, moving to later in life, going for crayons to more digital tools and a combination. Then the realistic view on top with a squiggly line that goes all over the place. The third one is an illustration of the comparison of what years was this person having fun and also learning new things. You can see some years they weren't really learning when they're having a lot of fun, and other years they were learning a lot and having a little less fun. The fourth one is all about herding cats. So this person took the different roles they've had in their careers along the x-axis, and then on the right axis, they talked about the number of cats that they've herded. So as a middle school teacher, you do a lot of cat herding. As a student, you don't really do that much. Then as a UX designer, they found themselves doing a lot more cat herding. The last one is what this person is interested in over the different ages of their life. They've categorized that by the different types of things that they could be interested in, from their family to gymnastics, to score, photography, and boys. You can see where each of those lies over time. So as you get started, definitely refer to the drying data library, the basics of each different chart type and what it would help you communicate. A bar chart for comparison, a doughnut chart for composition, a line chart for change over time, and many other examples. Now it's your turn to create your shitty first draft. All you need is a marker and an index card or a piece of paper. Set a timer for five minutes and create at least one, but as many charts as you can within five minutes. If you do nothing else, you'll have at least your shitty first draft to submit to the project page. But I will walk you through ways to take these to the next level. If you find one that works out really well. 4. Breaking Down Traditional Resumes: We all know the standard information required in a traditional resume, and in most cases, that's all the information we need and we don't really need to fear outside of it. For that reason, I use that as my starting point and I broke it down into each category on the resume, and I created a shady first draft for each one of those categories. Right now I want to walk you through my breakdown of the traditional resume in visual format to show you my thought process and the outputs that are my starting point. I used 50 three's app paper on my iPad Pro and my Apple Pencil, and if you want to see how I use this, go over to my other sculpture class on drawing data to communicate ideas. The first sheet contains all of my SFDs for my traditional resume, and just start to think of ways to make each one of these categories a little bit more interesting. Let's start with the contact info. This is the most boring part of any resume. It's just how to reach me. But what if you want to share with the recruiter, what time of day and what mode of communication is the best one for you? That's what I was thinking through for this option. I created a simple bar and I broke it down by hours of the day, starting in the morning from anytime until 7:00 AM I listed that is unavailable, and then from 7-9 you could call me. You probably have better luck during business hours if you send me an e-mail, and then in the evening you can call me until 10:00 PM. This is probably not that useful, but it was just a creative exercise and an SFD to get started. The second section of a traditional resume is typically an objective statement. That's where we'll say where you are today and where you want to be in the future. To work through this example, I just thought of an example objective statement, one that has three simple things in it, because I thought it would be fun to show it as a Venn diagram. This objective statement I came up with was, I'm seeking a management position in design for social good. Those are the three things, and I created a Venn diagram to show each of these three things as circles, and I thought it would be interesting to show that today maybe for example, you're working in two of those three things, and that would be represented by one star at that intersection, and then in the future, what your goal is, is to be working with all three of those things, and so you can highlight that in a visual format. The next section of your resume is typically your work history. You'll just include the years you've worked, the job title, the company, and the role that you had there. For this one in a visual format, I thought it would be fun to flip from vertical to horizontal. I worked from left to right, starting with the earliest part of your career or your journey, and typically that's your education and then moving to your first job, your second job, and then using a dotted line to represent your goal. The next thing I did was I just section these off to show the relative amount of times, doesn't have to be perfect, but if one was three years and one was five years, obviously, the one that's five years is going to be a little wider. The next thing I thought might be fun to add a y-axis to show those three objective points in the objective statement that we just went through, and how much of each one of those things you were doing at a certain period of time. Let's start with design. You did a lot of design in your education, maybe not so much in your first job, and then you're starting to pick it up in your second job. But what you're hoping to do is increase that even more. For social good, maybe you weren't doing it as much in your education, it happened a lot in your first job and your second job at Dept but you're hoping to bring that up as well, and then leadership. Less so in your education in first job really picks up in your second job but you're hoping to have a little bit more balance when it comes to your goal. The next area you might want to talk about on your traditional resume are technical skills or other skills that you possess. For this section, I think it would be interesting and I am varying a little into the untraditional here to add another dimension to what your skills are. In a lot of designer resumes, I see Adobe Creative Suite, and then a bar that's filled up to the degree of how adept you are with those tools. But that doesn't really tell me much because it's arbitrary, and it also doesn't really mean you're not capable of learning other tools. What I wanted to do was list out all of the technical skills and soft skills on an axis of what my current ability is for the x, and my desire to learn more about those skills on the y. I started with those and I listed out what my skills were, and plotted them on the map according to how I feel about each one. Let's just walk through a couple for a technical skill in the Adobe Creative Suite, This is something I've been using for a long time, so I listed it in the advanced category. Also something to know. I noted that this is a skill that I've applied for a 1000 plus hours, to show that there's a little bit of a quantitative reasoning behind where I placed it. But I also have a little bit less desire to learn more about the Adobe Creative Suite because I already have a sense of how it works. To contrast that, research is a soft skill that I don't really possess. I haven't had a lot of opportunity to experience it, but I want to learn more and to explain how I got to this position on the y-axis, I just added an annotation here that I'm constantly seeking resources for where and how to learn more about this thing. The next area that you might want to call and your resume is some information about: education, degrees, certifications or awards that you've received in your career. I just simply put these on a timeline. I thought about over time, starting from college, the different accomplishments, and how I would highlight them is through whether it was an award or recognition or a certification. You could less like I got a Professional Facilitation, certification recently I became a PMP, but earlier in time it was more awards and recognition. The last thing you might share on your traditional resume is what you're doing outside of work, specifically related to either board roles or community service. For this one, I hadn't used any doughnut or pie charts, so I thought I would create one for this, and the title of the chart is, "How I Give Back." I put that in the center of the doughnut, and then I just roughly broke up the doughnut by the proportion of time you spend, based on a 100 percent of all the time you do community service. Twenty five percent roughly is mentoring middle school students, for example. Maybe 60 percent, you're a liaison to a non-profit, and then maybe the rest of the time of your community service, you spend collecting technology to donate. These are just six examples of how you can take your traditional resume and break it down. What I want you to do now is look at your resume and think of ways that you can actually visualize some of this content and make it more creative and interesting. 5. Exploring Less Traditional Content: So now that you've created some simple visuals based on your traditional resume format, let's get more creative and think about ways to really communicate what makes you unique and share some things that help you stand out. It also makes it way more interesting when you're someone who's reviewing a resume and way more memorable. So I've got a few examples, more SFDs that I created on my iPad that I want to walk through to get your creative juices flowing. The first one is pretty complicated, so it might take me a while to explain. But I have this idea based on a book which I'll share in the class resources about your personality type. The idea is, it's not just a simple x, y, there are two more dimensions so that you have opposing perspectives on your personality on either side of the line. Let's start with Team versus Individual. Each one of these will be on a scale of 1-10. For job number 1, let's say this is the green here. In that job, you were really more focused on individual work, so I put that at a seven about and that means that on the other side of the spectrum, it's going to be about a three. Moving over to Creative versus Analytical. I gave myself, in job number 1, a nine. It was a very creative job, which means it doesn't actually have to be but in this case, I just ranked it as a one of analytical. I stumbled there because there are some cases where your job is both creative and analytical and in that instance, you'll just put both at number 5s because you want to show that you were balanced in those two areas. The next one would be Extroverted versus Introverted. So in job number 1, the green one, I was super introverted, and so the extroverted number falls closer to the center. It was 100 percent Local, so I put that at a 10 and the Global section at zero. You could just stop there and say those are my goals, but I got a little crazy with this and added two more colors to show job number 2 in blue and how the whole shape of it shifts because I was more focused on team. I was more global in job number 2 and more extroverted, so everything moves over to the right with these three dimensions. Then I thought it would be fun to also show in Goal job that the goal is to be a little bit closer to the center of each of these axis. Now, this is something that's like a visual mess and so as a shitty first draft, it's fine, but if I was going to put this in a visual resume, I would definitely want to think of ways to simplify it and because of the different layers of information, this implies to me that it would be a perfect example to build into some interactive visualization. I'll try to do that for you and put it in the class page to show how I can take it from a sketch to a realistic interactive dashboard type of visualization. Another area that you could highlight to show what makes you interesting and stuff that I love to see and learn about on people's resumes or in interviews is, what are you reading? Then you can take different books that you've read and rank them according to ones that you enjoyed or you didn't like so much, or reasons that you've read them. Are you reading it just for fun or are you reading it to learn or to get some business skills. This is a spectrum because you could be reading something for fun and for business and in which case you'll put it somewhere like this. If you don't enjoy something but you're required to learn it or read it, you might put it in the bottom left. But if you really enjoyed something and it was just for fun, you can put it on the top right. Another thing to point out here in my SFD, I created different sized bubbles because I wanted to show that some of these books might have been really short books, easy and fast to read, and then the bigger sized bubbles could be longer books that have more pages. If you were going to do this in a non SFD format with more detail, you would definitely want to write the book title, so maybe Pride and Prejudice is this one over here, just an example. Another way to show more about who you are is how you like to learn. In this one, I just created a simple doughnut chart and rather than show what I know, what my education is, it shows how you like to learn. In my case, I learned a lot in college, I did not learn as much in all of the mandatory professional development trainings that I got, so that one is the smallest slice of the doughnut. But I did learn a lot on the job and teaching others. Since those two things were probably about the same, I just reserved the rest of the doughnut right there for things that I've learned in online courses and books and podcasts and whatnot. Another area that's really interesting and is hard to share how you work is what are your favorite tools? Especially as designers, we have hundreds of tools available for us to use. I think it's silly to say it's a job requirement to know how to use Balsamiq for wire-framing if you like to use Adobe sketch. So what I tried to think through is a way to show my creative workspace and what it looks like and what apps I might be using on any given day, because I think that's more creative and clever than just listing a bunch of applications that you know how to use. So I thought it would be cool to just draw my desktop and then show when I'm working on an iPad with my Apple Pencil, I use these apps, but when I'm working on my MacBook, I prefer these apps. But I also incorporated color to show that I can work in analog formats and I sometimes prefer just to use sticky notes and markers and whiteboards. This one, I think, has a lot of potential to create a custom illustration, maybe something that goes on a website and is maybe clickable with hyperlinks or embedded photos or something. This one is pretty simple. I think something that people forget and maybe you include on your resume if you speak Chinese and Spanish, but we also all speak different technical languages. If you've been to school, like for example, I went to school, I studied Computer Science and art but I took some business classes, that gave me a leg up and it's something that I use a lot in my day-to-day work. So I want to showcase that on my resume. I just created simple icons to show that I speak the language of creative and design, I speak the language of tech, and I speak business. Those are things that if you're looking for a job in say project management for design, that might be really helpful. Then these last two are out there. I don't know why you would want to share what your family members situation is, but I thought it might be fun just to show that I am the youngest of three kids, I have two parents, mom and dad, I'm married and I have my own two pets. It's just something that makes it a little bit more personal and fun. Probably not something I would put on an official resume, but maybe something I'll post on my website. Then the last thing is proudest accomplishments. Now, I totally made this up. I haven't actually climbed all these mountains. But let's say you are a mountain climber, a mountain biker, or you like to assemble cars or something like that, that's something that would be really interesting and help incite a conversation with a potential employer. So why not include it somewhere on your resume or your website? In this case, I just layered over a bunch of different mountains and I guessed about which one would have the highest peak and then added the date for which you climbed those mountains. I haven't actually climbed any of those mountains, so maybe this is a goal for me and a vision for the future. What I want you to do now is do something similar. Maybe set a timer so you don't take forever or give yourself as much time as you want. But think through what makes you really unique and interesting and maybe take some of these examples, or maybe use some that we walked through earlier and try to replicate it or just create your own visualization. Use these as a starting point for the next two exercises where we make them a little bit more polished. 6. Hand Drawn Charts in Adobe Draw: So hopefully now you have a lot of really good ideas and a lot of really good sketches going for traditional resume or more creative versions. I want to just point out that it's really important to start with drawings, even if you're not super comfortable and you're not sure if they're going to look good enough, they are just the starting point and now we're going to take it into ways to make those drawings look a little bit better and a little bit more polished. The first way that I want to share how to make your drawings look more polished is for those of you who have an iPad or maybe you're thinking about getting an iPad. So I've been using the 53 app paper to do my drive because that's the one I have, most comfort with and I can draw really fast and move things around the page really comfortably and like I mentioned, you can go to my other skill share classes to see more about exactly how I do that, but I've also discovered a new tool that I really like called Adobe draw on the iPad, which I then have started to use a lot more when I need to take one of ideas and make it more polished and maybe go in and edit it a little bit more. So Adobe draw is a vector drawing program and you can create simple drawings and then import them to Adobe Creative Cloud and open them and illustrator and make any edits you want. It's a really flexible program and it's a lot of fun to use. So what I decided to do is take a couple of those drawings. The one about the languages and the one about my workspace because I think both of those would turn into nice illustrations. So for the first one, I'll just walk you through a little bit about Adobe draw interface. You've got different projects that you can create and then within each project, these are your art boards. So if I want to create a new one, I just hit the page plus and then hit this button on the left side of the page, you've got some pens. I like to use just the typical round stylus but you can play around with other tips and you can change the colors, the opacity and the size. So I'll just start with black because you can change the colors to be anything you want and I'll show you how that works but for the languages illustration. We'll just start with maybe the creative one looks like a a bumpy cloud and then I'll just use the eraser to open up this area right here, just show, it looks like a speech bubble. Maybe the one about business is a round shape and then maybe the one about tech is more of a rectangle. What you will do is get them to all intersect in one area. So this is a starting point and you can see that each of these is a closed shape. What's cool about draw is that you can just tap in a space now where they all intersect and hold it down and then it fills with color. If you wanted to make these a little bit more polished, you can try some of the shapes in the top-left. So maybe a circle. You can resize it and it gives you something to trace and it holds it within that shape and then another thing to pay attention to is the layers. So if you wanted to draw something, but then maybe get rid of it or move it around, you can put it on a new layer and then click on some of those options to make some adjustments to the layer. So that's within those three dots. You can resize it, you can move it around it, you can duplicate it or deleted it. So that's a little bit about how draw works. I wanted to show you my process for now. If you know how it works, how I would create a more detailed and more clean drawing. So this is a second, first draft of the workspace idea that I had. So I've got my computer or my iPad, maybe some more analog tools and maybe some books to show what I'm reading and what I'm working on. The next thing I would want to do if I'm happy with where this is, because maybe the colors aren't right, but maybe the shapes are good enough, is I would click this button, send to Illustrator Creative Cloud. What happens is if you have illustrator open on your computer, it just magically opens up in Adobe Illustrator, which is pretty awesome. Some of the lines and anchor points are a little bit messy, but there's nothing like this that exists anywhere else and it really changed my opinion about what I'm capable of. Now that I can just draw straight on the iPad and then open it and edit it in my computer. So maybe I'll change these to be actual typed out annotations. I'll remove the word app and I'll write InDesign. You could also blend some hand-drawn components with some computer-generated components. I just wanted to show you this. So you can see if you haven't seen Adobe draw already, what degree of flexibility you have with this type of digital drawing, you can adjust the anchor points, you can use the shape tool to make it look cleaner and more polished and what I'm going to do is create a more clean and more polished version of my workspace and I'll share that in the class page along with the files for you to explore yourself. 7. Computer Generate Charts in Google Sheets + Tableau: We're at the last exercise where we're going to create computer-generated charts, both static and interactive. We'll start with the static version, and I'm going to use Google Sheets and Google slides, but you can use Keynote or PowerPoint and Excel. I just want to encourage you before jumping into any of these computer-generated tools to start with a drawing. I don't want you to even open the software until you have an idea on a piece of paper or on your iPad. This is really important because if you just go straight to PowerPoint, you're going to go through the library of different illustrations and diagrams and you're going to pick one and then your resume is going to look like everyone else's and the content is really just not going to be interesting. It's really important to start with a sketch and that's why we start and have encouraged you before. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty on paper because now we're going to make it pretty in the computer. The one that I started with is the traditional resume and I took the simple doughnut chart because I know that's a really easy one to create in Google Sheets. The three categories that I am dividing between our mentoring middle school students, being a non-profit liaison, and collecting use technology. I knew these are roughly about the amount of time that we spent for each. Create two columns and then the quantity is in the second column. Then all you have to do is highlight this shape or those rows and columns. Insert a chart and look through all the different chart types they have. You can see it starts suggesting a pie, but I prefer a doughnut because I like to put the title in the middle. It also starts with some ugly colors, what I'll go and do is, I'm going to skip the title because I want to put the title in google slides. But just change some of the colors by going down to the series, taking mentoring middle school students, making it a dark gray, choose non-profit liaison, you get a lighter gray and then collecting technology and making it the lightest gray. It's important to make sure that you have contrast. I'll also play around with where the labels go. I think I can do that once I've created the chart. See what our options are. We all move this to labeled, I think I like the way that looks. Then I'm going to undo that. This is all about playing around with it and figuring out what you think looks good. Once you've got a basic chart, or stop fiddling around with it and just paste this in. Just copy it, and paste it into a new sheet in your google slides. You can either choose to link it to your spreadsheet. If you want to go back and change the data, it'll change and update the chart with it, or even just paste it directly. This is the starting point. You can think about where to put it on the page if you want to include the rest of your resume around it, but typically I would just start by adding the context that's necessary. Insert a text box with the title, volunteer work. This is an example of a potential projects that you could submit, just this one chart. If you're a graphic designer, then use your creative freedom to make this look as cool or as funky as you want because that also helps express what you're capable of. You not just capable of the quantitative presentation of information, but you're capable of that creative and the aesthetic appeal as well. Another visualization that I created in my SFDs was the concept of an objective statement using a Venn diagram. That's another really easy one to create and another one you could find in the PowerPoint library if you wanted to. But we're just going to create our own using simple circles. I will just format this was no fill and I'll create the line using a gray and a little bit thicker and then I'll copy and paste it twice and just get an intersection here. I'm not going to make it perfect for now. But the whole point of this one was to take my sketch and then recreate it in a way that looks super polished and more professional. I'll insert two other shapes. I had stars in there for where I was now and where I want to be. I don't see a star, so maybe I'll draw one. There's one. But if I don't like the shape of this, you can always go in and draw your own. I'll move this to where I am now, and then copy and paste it to the middle where I want to be and then use color to distinguish where you want to be. Again, spend your time and use your best judgment and how to format it. Use color, if you know that color is going to be available and it's not a printed resume. Use typography and a layout that fits in well with the rest of the content you have. If you had fun with the static charts and you want to get a little bit more creative and go a little deeper and if you're pretty comparable in terms of basic data manipulation and creating basic charts, you might really like Tableau Public. I started using Tableau back on a job when I needed to create some interactive maps for a client of mine and it was an amazing discovery because it creates very nice-looking interactive charts, but it's also a drag-and-drop interface and you don't have to be a developer to use it. I will say there is a steep learning curve at first. But I want to just introduce you to it and show you how it works and I will also link to all kinds of amazing resources that the Tableau community has out there. If this is something you want to dig into. There are two things you're going to need in order to get started. The first one is a Tableau Public account, which is where you can create the interactive charts and then host them on this website and then you can link to them via your website or via static form of your resume. Then you need a dataset. The datasets that I created, I put into Microsoft Excel. I just added all of my work history. I started with company, title, category, start date, and end date. Then I thought about what else might be interesting to include, so I added the section for the skills I have, the tools that I used in that job, any the accomplishments. I haven't gone into this quite yet in any of the visualizations I created, but I added some of the data for the creative visualization chart that I walked through about the personality types, I might go create a chart using that information. I figured I would just throw it into the spreadsheet to see how it will go. Tableau works best. If you connect it to one sheet and it's much easier this way. You don't have to worry about joining any of the data. That's flat and structured in this way. Each header has the category name and then every row below it has the information contained within each row of information. Once you have this, you just save it somewhere and then you open Tableau. The first thing you'll see is you've got dimensions and measures. The dimensions are things that are qualitative, measures are quantitative sayings and it automatically knows that. You can just drag and drop any of these things to create a chart. I'd rather have you walk through a more official tutorial to get started. Because some of these things I've skipped over and it can be a little frustrating. Make sure if you really want to do this, you click on one of those links that I share. But I didn't want to show you what it's capable of. Taking a look at this basic chart here, I created a timeline that stacks up all of my work experience and if you hover over it, you can see the period of time and the skills that I acquired during that job. What company did I work for, what was my role and sometimes it's the same company about my role changes and then what I'm doing now. I also divided that into volunteer work. There is a step-by-step tutorial video on how to create this type of chart that I followed in order to create this. I'd never done anything like this before, but I put this together in about 45 minutes last night. Once you have one thing, you can create another sheet by just selecting this button here and then you can bring them all together and what they call a dashboard. That's what I was doing as a work in progress and I've created the timeline at the top. Eventually or probably you can move things around the page and format them and create layouts. Eventually I'll probably go in and add a lot of other details. Some of them will be statics, some of them I'll be interactive charts based on the content that I have in my spreadsheet. This is something that in order to save, you have to save it to Tableau Public, which means anyone who has the Internet basically can look at your visual resume. You have to be comfortable with it being saved up there. This work-in-progress is up on Tableau Public. The cool thing about it is you can download my exact workbook and look and see how I formatted everything and try it out with your own dataset. Once I've completed this, I'll upload this for you guys to play around with as well. An interactive infographic is a really cool way to showcase what you're capable of and it really helps you stand out. The one drawback is that it's not the typical format, so it relies on someone clicking on a link, whether it's in your resume or on your website in order to see it. 8. Closing and Resources: Congrats on making it through the exercises. If you're having a lot of fun with it, be sure to check out the resources on the class pages. I've got tutorials and examples and all kinds of inspiration for you there. I also wanted to share with you two books that I reference quite a bit when I need to do some visual thinking and strategic thinking about my personal life or my ideas. The first one is called "The Decision Book." Its got 50 miles for strategic thinking, and what's cool is that they're categorized by how to improve yourself, how to understand others better, how to understand yourself better, and how to improve others. You can open up this book and get a different chart type for a different purpose, and it really helps you get some clarity on the things that you have in your head. Second book is called "My Life in Graphs-A Guided Journal." This one is like a fill in the blank. There's five or six basic chart types, bar charts, pie charts, some Venn diagrams, and some pyramids, but it's got suggestions and prompts for what topic and what content you might want to put in there. This has a lot of really fun and really good ideas, and it's almost like a personal journal to document where you are in your life and where you want to go. I mentioned a lot of resources and links and inspiration in my class page that I'm going to upload, but I think the real inspiration will come from all of you and the projects that you post. I'm going to look at each and every project posted. I really hope that even if it's just a sketch and you need a little help moving forward, you post it and I will answer any questions you have and give you feedback and ideas on how to take it to the next level. Thanks so much for joining this class. I can't wait to see what types of projects you all submit.