Ballast resume & CV template
Grey bands behind every heading with the leading pulled in and three columns of skills. Heavy, in a useful way.
Summary
Product designer with 8 years shipping data-heavy tools for small teams. I work close to engineering, prototype in code, and care most about the boring flows nobody screenshots.
Experience
Senior Product Designer, Northwind
Mar 2022 – Present
San Francisco, CA
- Led the redesign of the reporting suite, cutting time-to-first-report from 11 minutes to under 2
- Built and maintained the design system now used by 4 product teams
- Ran the research programme that reshaped the 2024 roadmap
Product Designer, Lumen Labs
Jan 2019 – Feb 2022
Remote
- Owned onboarding end to end; activation rose from 34% to 58%
- Shipped the mobile app's first accessible colour system
- Ran the weekly design critique that became the team's review standard
Junior Designer, Foundry Studio
Jun 2018 – Dec 2018
Portland, OR
- Designed marketing sites for eight early-stage clients
- Built the studio's first shared component library in Figma
Education
BA, Interaction Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Sep 2014 – May 2018
Providence, RI
Certificate, Human-Computer Interaction, University of California, San Diego
Feb 2020 – Aug 2020
Remote
Skills
- Design systems (Expert)
- Prototyping (Expert)
- User research (Advanced)
- Figma (Expert)
- HTML & CSS (Advanced)
- Accessibility (Advanced)
- Design tokens (Advanced)
- Usability testing (Advanced)
Languages
- English (Native)
- Spanish (Fluent)
- Portuguese (Conversational)
Certificates
Nielsen Norman UX Certification, NN/g
Apr 2023 – Apr 2023
IAAP Accessibility Core Competencies, IAAP
Sep 2022 – Sep 2022
What defines this layout
- Sans-serif typeface
- Single column
- No photo
- Headings on a tinted bar
- Dates right-aligned against each role
Every one of these is a setting, not a constraint — accent colour, font, size, spacing and page margins stay yours under Customize, and switching template later re-renders what you’ve written rather than starting it over.
Using Ballast as a CV
Ballast needs nothing changed to serve as a UK, Irish or Australian CV — those markets mean by "CV" exactly what the US means by "resume", and this is already that document. Add a photo and personal details only if you are applying into continental Europe.
It is set tight, which helps on the two-page limit most non-academic CVs are read against.
More on the differences: CV templates and CV examples.
Is Ballast the right choice?
Who it suits
Dense pages that still need clear sections. Grey bands and tight leading, with three columns of skills to keep the list short.
What it does to ATS parsing
Single column with background fills behind the headings. Safe.
At two pages
Very good, and dense enough that many histories will not need it.
Use something else if
Milestone for more air, or Girder if you need to go tighter still.
Other templates
Build it in the editor
Live preview, AI writing help, and an ATS-ready PDF. Free to start, and no card at any point.
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