Expert Tips & Templates To Help You Easily Create a Designer Bio

You’ve spent hours and days writing an engaging and powerful professional bio. You feel confident you have written outstanding, attention-getting content. But now you face a new problem. Your bio looks plain! It isn’t eye-catching at all. And you know that appearance matters. You are sure that a designer bio using modern design elements to increase eye appeal will make all the difference in whether your professional biography gets attention and gets read.

It is true, an eye-catching designer bio will make a huge positive difference by increasing your competitive edge and improving the first impression that your bio makes. After all, the purpose of a bio is to provide an attention-grabbing and meaningful introduction to you by telling your story in a way that illustrates your professional value. And first impressions matter. Whether you are a new college graduate or a C-suite executive, you will benefit by reformatting your plain text bio using a designer bio template.

The difference speaks for itself. Take a look at the incredible difference our Distinctive Resume Templates designer bio templates make! The content for both of these bios was professionally written by Distinctive Career Services. Remember: the content is always the MOST important part of any career marketing document whether it is a resume, a cover letter, or a biography. Hiring the services of a professional resume writer is well worth the investment! But if your bio content is already written — or if you are a professional writer who writes biographies for your clients and wishes to give them the incredible competitive edge of a professionally designed bio, our designer bio templates are the solution!

The content of this biography was written by Distinctive Career Services. The bio template used is from our Morning Glory Collection.

The content of this biography was written by Distinctive Career Services. The bio template used is from our Berry Perfection Collection.

The professional biographies of yesterday were just text on a piece of paper. Some people included a professional photograph of themselves, but for the most part, the entire biography was comprised of just paragraphs of text.

But, first impressions matter, and smart professionals care about the image of themselves that they are promoting to the world. Also, given all the distractions of modern life, if you want your bio to be read it must capture attention first. And the best way to capture attention is with an eye-catching design that achieves the dual purpose of helping make the content easier to read too.

Including a professional photograph of yourself on your designer bio is recommended. You have a lot of flexibility in how you include it and exactly where you include it. The most common positioning for your headshot is usually near the top of the bio, but this isn’t an absolute rule as you can see from these examples from our biography templates.

One word of caution. Your resume and your biography are two separate documents. While including your picture on your biography is the norm, you should NEVER include a picture of yourself on your resume meant for use in the U.S. job market (this is not necessarily the case in other job markets around the world). Unfortunately, many of the resume templates available on the internet include a photograph. We highly advise against using these templates unless you remove the space for the photograph (and also make sure the format is ATS friendly).

Another element that has probably caught your attention as you review our designer bios is the sidebar or other callouts included in each. This is a highly flexible and adaptable technique that gives you space to call out key points and make your bio easier to read.

As you can see from these example biography templates, your options for how to style this are only limited by your creativity. Of course, when you use one of our biography templates, we do the hard work of designing the document for you. All you need to do is replace the “dummy” text in the template with your own.

Finally, don’t just randomly choose a design for your bio. To create the best impression, your designer bio should be created to coordinate with all your career documents, including your resume, cover letters, references, any resume addendums, and any other career marketing document in your portfolio.

The template collections offered by Distinctive Resume Templates make this easy for you! Just choose the templates designed in the format that most appeals to you, download the entire collection, change the color scheme to match your branding (yes, you can easily change the colors of any of our templates with just a couple of mouse clicks), and create your career portfolio using the coordinating templates in the collection.

Here are just a couple of examples of your many template choices that show the amazing positive difference our template collections can make, giving you or your clients a remarkable professional edge.