Designer Cover Letter

Your resume is only one panel of a triptych that presents you to prospective employers: its other two components are your portfolio and a cover letter. This last-named document is a vestige of the formal business letter that job searchers used to send out together with their resumes. It went on top when the papers were folded up so that, when the envelope was opened, the letter covered the resume. Whence the term cover letter. Although the name and format are relics of an earlier type of business correspondence, the exercise of creating a cover letter to go along with your resume emphatically did not die out with the dinosaur. Except in the rare cases in which a job description explicitly specifies no cover letter, you have plenty of good reasons for submitting one, even when it’s deemed optional or not mentioned in the job description at all.

How to Write a Designer Cover Letter

As far as its format is concerned, a cover letter incorporates an inside address, the date, a salutation, a body, a closing compliment, and a signature. Once upon a time, you learned about these components in typing class, where you typed out countless such letters as you mastered the keyboard. Nowadays, with less formal email as the norm for business correspondence, the conventions of the business letter are being forgotten, and most people learn them on-the-fly while trying to compose their first cover letters. As a result, the rules may all seem terribly random and pointlessly regimented, but the prevailing custom is that they be followed closely. A well-crafted cover letter may even persuade a Hiring Director to call you in for an interview despite a less-than-ideal resume.

Link and Refer to Your Portfolio

Of the three elements in a designer’s job application, by far the most important is the one the Hiring Director looks at last: your portfolio. The whole point of your cover letter and resume is to get the Hiring Director to look at your actual work and be bowled over by your artistic vision.

As such, you want to make it as easy as you can for anyone reading your cover letter to locate your portfolio when the time comes. You should therefore have a live link to it in the header of your cover letter. You should also mention your portfolio in the final paragraph of your cover letter, amidst a call to action and such customary formalities as thanking your letter’s recipient. You might try something like this: “I invite you to take a look at my portfolio [link] for examples of the kind of work I can do for [name of company]. Thank you for your time and consideration; I look forward to meeting with you in the near future.”

Use the Hiring Director’s Name in the Salutation

Once you’ve typed the date on your cover letter, you have to type the salutation and, voilà!, your first obstacle. To whom are you writing? If you’re answering an online job posting, the likelihood is that the job description will omit the name of the Hiring Director. Before you jump the gun and type “To whom it may concern,” know that that time-trusted formula has gone out of fashion. It’s also a little sour in tone, as it’s often used at the start of angry missives from the neighbors about your tuba playing at two o’clock in the morning. You may also have heard of “Dear Sir or Madam (as the case may be)” or its briefer equivalent, “Dear Sir/Madam,” but those are considered démodé as well, particularly on the grounds of overformality.

So what do you put for the X in “Dear X”? A very good all-purpose solution to the dilemma is “Dear Hiring Director,” as that is obviously the whom to whom you’re writing and the whom whom the letter concerns. Seems easy as an empty net goal, right? Type that, hit “enter” twice, and start worrying about creating a snappy opening paragraph that will grab your reader.

Except that, every single online resource for writing cover letters tells you that you need to dig up the name of the Hiring director and start your letter off with “Dear Mr. Smith” or “Dear Ms. Doe.” Some primal online job seeker probably thought using the Hiring Director’s name would be a great way of impressing the boss-to-be, and the result is that everyone has to do it now. Yes, you can go with “Dear Hiring Director,” but the warnings are unanimous that Hiring Directors like seeing their names on cover letters addressed to them. You’d think that they’d therefore put their names in the job descriptions they write, but they frequently don’t.

So what’s the deal? While no one’s trying to mess with your head, you’re still being sent on a quest to prove your worthiness. If the job really matters to you, the thinking may well go, you’ll put in the extra time to find out the Hiring Director’s full name and title. You’re thus going to have to trawl the internet to find out what they are.

You should begin by scouring the company website for a clue as to the covert identity of the person who gets to decide whether you get to eat next month. If that fails, you may have to broaden your search by taking to LinkedIn or the company’s Facebook page. One of Indeed’s suggestions is that you copy the job description in its entirety, enclose it in quotes, and paste it into the Google search box. That should bring up the other employment sites on which the job is posted, one of which might include the magic name. You can also go old school and call the company, although, these days, you’re just as likely to be answered by a recording instead of an operator with a company directory. Other suggestions to be found include emailing an underling in the department to which you’re applying, making up a pretext for contacting them, and then sneaking in the all-important question (“I just happened to notice by a total fluke that we both belong to the same group on Facebook and was wondering if you could put me in touch with someone who could give me more information on the job that just so happens to be available in your department.”) You can also note the email address on the job description and take out your Scrabble set to see whether the address can be unscrambled into an actual name.

Sound advice: if you really are running email addresses through anagrammers, go with “Dear Hiring Director.” Hiring Directors are reputed to spend about a minute on each cover letter they read. One wonders seriously whether they devote a significant portion of that minute to scan for the salutation and check to see whether you have unearthed the occult magic formula. While the whole thing may be a charade invented by Indeed and repeated ad nauseam by every other job-search advice site on the internet, you’re going to want to hedge your bets whenever possible in your job search. So do your research to the best of your ability and think ahead to starting your interview off with a bang by shaking hands and being able to say, “pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith.”

Unless you know the Hiring Director personally and the two of you are already on a first-name footing, the salutation should be worded “Dear Mr. Doe” or “Dear Ms. Smith.” In the event that the Hiring Director’s first name is frustratingly androgynous, you can either make a phone call to the HR department (“I have some correspondence for Jordan Doe, and I want to be sure that I’m addressing it properly”) or fudge the matter by resorting to “Dear Peyton Smith.”

In all the above cases, contemporary practice follows the salutation with a comma and a double line space.

Keep It All Pulled Together and Bot-Friendly

The first thing the Hiring Director is likely to see from you is your cover letter, and it, therefore, should demonstrate that it’s emanated from someone with a keen sense of what looks good on a piece of paper. Before you get all excited about showing off your talents by sticking in everything you know about InDesign and Illustrator, you should know that before the Hiring Director gets to see your cover letter, it’s going to be electronically vetted (just like your resume) by tartar hordes of Applicant Tracking System (ATS) bots, not all of which can read elaborately formatted text.

Yes, this limits the number of design elements at your disposal, and you may feel that it saps all the fun and individuality from your cover letter and resume, but there are ways to show creativity while sticking to no more than a pair of legible fonts. You can’t do much with the letter’s body text, since today’s practice is to left-justify all of it, but you can create something different in your letter’s header, where your contact details figure. Your header should also match that on your resume exactly: imagine the two documents lying side-by-side on the Hiring Director’s desk and create them accordingly. The text in your portfolio should match the resume/cover letter header and fonts as well: it should all be a neat package that fits together in a way that is aesthetically pleasing in its regularity.

Tailor Your Letter to the Job

Just as you have to tailor your resume anew for each job for which you apply, you have to tailor the cover letter as well. Generic cover letters are a huge no-no, despite the fact that you’re writing about the same person (yourself) each time and the facts of the case change not at all. Yes, certainly, there are bits and pieces of your cover letter that can be reused from job to job, but you still have to tailor the thing to suit the circumstances of each position for which you are applying.

How do you tailor a cover letter? Go back once again to the job description, pick out the recurring words (not “and” and “or,” but the substantive ones like “Adobe Photoshop” and “team player”), and weave them into your description of yourself (your first paragraph), how you fit the role (your second paragraph), and what you can bring to the company (tertio paragrapho). You’re going to have to research the company in some depth, and if it has a mission statement, work that (and how well you fit in with it) into your letter as well.

Part of this is telling the ATS bots what they want to hear. The problem is that human Hiring Directors are not as easily fooled as their digital lackeys, and, for them, your letter needs not only to demonstrate that you did the research they expect you to have conducted but also to demonstrate why you’re the best designer for the job. That is optimally done by showing it through anecdotal evidence from your career, which gives you a chance to expand upon your resume rather than recapitulating it. You want the two documents to complement each other and work in tandem to convince someone to hire you or at least bring you in for an interview. As with your resume, however, if you can quantify the success story, by all means, do so: “increased ROI by 23% Q/Q” sounds a lot more impressive than “I made more money for the company.”)

In cinematic parlance, the cover letter may be a good place for an “outtake” from your resume: something you couldn’t squeeze into the latter and which is better suited to being recounted in prose rather than in the telegraphic style of a bullet point. To achieve an optimal balance between cover letter and resume, take them apart at the same time, and then use your metaphoric needle and thread to stitch them into a perfectly coordinated suit.

Add Pizzazz Within Reason

You’re a designer. You’re supposed to be able to create designs with visual flair. One place to deploy that talent is in the composition of your cover letter (and resume), but the possibilities there are limited, given that your letter is going to be vetted by a bot with no aesthetic sensibilities of which to speak.

Another way to show off your flair is through the language you use in your cover letter, especially in your opening paragraph, which should go off with a bang. You should always mention the job title and where you saw the posting (that at least gives you the first clause of your letter), but you can do whatever you want after that, and the more it grabs the reader, the better. “I feel I’m the ideal candidate for the role” has been done to death, so you’ll have to get in there with a reason why you’re ideal for the role in the space of one and a half sentences.

You can take a risk here (nothing ventured, nothing gained) if you like, but not too big a risk. You’ll have done research about the company, and you should have a good indicator of how far you can stray from the professional-yet-friendly tone customary for cover letters. A quirky fashion house will, you can infer, be more welcoming to language that veers from the usual than a firm that’s been around for a hundred years and is looking to fill a vacancy in its marketing department.

By all means, put some pizzazz into your language. Imagine that you’re mailing your cover letter in an envelope that you’ve rigged to explode and shower confetti all over the recipient’s desk. That’s the effect you want to get. Use your research to keep from going overboard, but yes, be daring to a degree. Being merely correct is not going to get you noticed in a pile of a hundred bot-scanned cover letters.

5 Designer Cover Letter Tips

Tip #1: Use Keywords

Bad news: the ATSs that screen resumes are capable of screening cover letters as well, and they’re looking for the same keywords in the latter as in the former. You won’t get past the bots and into the Hiring Director’s hands unless your letter contains the words that the bots are set to accept. The keywords need to be distilled from the printed job description, and, since bots aren’t good with synonyms, stick to the words themselves. “Team player” means you put “team player,” not “plays well with others.” You have to be crafty in the way you work the keywords into your letter if you want to impress the Hiring Director, but they have to be there to impress the bots. They don’t have to be there twenty times, but they have to be in the text of your letter. While this may seem like an annoyingly onerous task, the reality is that a lot of the keywords will fall into place almost naturally when you’re writing about how well-suited you are to the position in question.

Tip #2: Go Easy on the “I” s

Your cover letter is all about you, and judicious infusions of chutzpah and flagrant self-promotion aren’t going to hurt your chances of landing an interview. That, however, doesn’t mean that you can write a series of simple declarative sentences that start with “I”: “I did this. I did that. I did something else. I did something else still. I’m wonderful” is tedious in the extreme. Although you don’t want to have 856-word Proustian sentences in a cover letter, joining some of those simple sentences above into something less monotonous in rhythm is highly recommended. But you still shouldn’t write something like: “I did this, and I did that, then I did something else before I did something else still. Therefore, I’m wonderful.”

You need to watch the “I” s to keep your prose more engaging and elegant. (The above example can come out to: “I did this, that, something else, and something else still, which makes me wonderful.) If you’re writing and you find yourself with a string of sentences beginning with “I,” play with your sentence structure to avoid too many nominative first-person pronouns.

The same applies to paragraphs. You don’t want a four-paragraph letter in which every paragraph begins with “I.” It may take a little writerly ingenuity, but it’s the difference between an amateurish effort and a professional-looking letter.

Tip #3: Show Enthusiasm, but Don’t Beg

Throughout your cover letter, your goal is to convince the reader that you’re the best person for the job. You do this by doing a sales job on yourself and by carrying on a demonstration of why you fit in with what you’ve managed to learn about the company. You should be self-confident, within reason, and enthusiastic about the opening. Thus you can say, “I believe myself to be a highly worthy candidate for the position,” but you can’t say, “I’m so awesome you won’t be able to stand it when I come in for my interview.” Similarly, you can write, “I was most excited to learn of the opening in your department,” but you probably shouldn’t write, “I passed out from delighted shock when I discovered the amazing possibility for me in your department.”

You need balance in your self-confidence and enthusiasm. You should also bear in mind that, within the limited space at your disposal, you’re making a demonstration of why you belong in that role at that company. You’re just not telling them you’re awesome; you should be showing it. That should help take the curse off some of the self-promotion. 

You should also be unfailingly polite but without resorting to the formality of business writing of previous generations. Thus formulas like “I thank you for your consideration in this matter and look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience” have to be replaced by something more homespun and pushy (your final paragraph needs to contain a so-called call to action), such as: “Thank you for your time; I look forward to discussing this matter with you further when we meet in person.” And never forget “please” and “thank you.”

You should finish the letter with a standard closing compliment. “Sincerely” is the most frequently encountered sign-off in American business correspondence, so you might as well use it. You can venture into “regards” if you like, be they of the best, kind, or kindest variety, but you shouldn’t try to get any fancier than that. Remember to follow the closing compliment with a comma, a blank line space, and your name. (If you’re working with a letter that is going to be printed out and handed or mailed to the Hiring Director as a hard copy, you should quadruple space before typing your name, leaving room for your signature, which should be in either black or blue ink.)

Tip #4: Keep the Letter to One Not-Crowded Page

Just as inflexibly as a resume, a cover letter should be one page long. Period.

If writing about yourself comes easily, you may end up with too much material for one page. Edit yourself by eighty-sixing anything that’s not completely germane to the job description. If you’re less skilled at blowing your own horn, you may have trouble filling up a page. While plenty of white space surrounding your text is a virtue, if the sheet of paper has more white space than print, you run the risk of appearing curt.

A cover letter should run from 250 to 400 words, which should fit single-spaced onto an 8½” x 11” sheet of paper with 1” margins. Once you’ve selected your typeface (or pair of typefaces), you should try to make it all work using 12-point fonts. Failing that, you can go down to 11-point. Some typefaces may work at 10-point as well, but some will already begin to look small. As John Hancock did when signing the Declaration of Independence, you want your letter’s recipient to be able to read your message without recourse to donning spectacles.

Tip #5: Get Feedback

You should absolutely get feedback on your cover letter. The first feedback should come from an automatic grammar checker. It will probably make your copy sound like it went through an automatic grammar checker (especially if you accept all of the checker’s corrections), but that’s better than having your copy be incorrect. Spelling mistakes, typographical errors, and grammatical blunders can sink your ship before it leaves port.

Being your own editor is important as well. Although you can’t accurately proofread your own copy (it’s a rule of nature), you should put your finished letter away until the following morning and go over it again with a fine-tooth comb. Reading your writing aloud can be an effective means of anticipating its reception and is a good way to catch infelicities like unintentional internal rhymes. You should definitely give your cover letter this treatment: it won’t take long to do, and it can be an extremely effective way of polishing your work.

You perhaps don’t need professional feedback on a cover letter as much as you do on a resume, so showing your letters to family and friends may be sufficient to catch mistakes and evaluate your tone. Just don’t shoot the messenger if they aren’t ideally diplomatic in their criticism of your letter. Better to get that from someone you know than having the Hiring Director consign your flawed masterpiece to the dustbin.

That’s by no means to say that you shouldn’t take advantage of professional feedback when it’s available. Some schools that prepare students for their design careers include career guidance with the price of admission. Noble Desktop’s online and in-person (in New York City) certificate programs in Motion Graphics, UI Design, and Graphic Design all provide 1:1 mentoring of students, including advice on such important aspects of a job search as cover letters.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.