Create a Standout Visual Résumé with Visual Thinking

What it actually covers

Catherine Madden's course is not a resume-writing class or a design-software tutorial. It is a short creativity exercise dressed up as a career project. The arc runs from paper to pixel: first a five-minute timed sketching drill using "shitty first drafts," then a walkthrough of Madden's own index-card examples (a Venn diagram objective statement, a herding-cats career chart, a skills map plotted by proficiency versus desire to learn), then a pass at turning those sketches into cleaner output in Adobe Draw, Google Sheets, and Tableau Public. The insistence on starting with pen and paper before opening any software is the course's clearest organizing principle, repeated at every transition point.

The content-brainstorming lesson is the strongest section. Rather than just prettifying a standard resume, Madden walks through several genuinely odd but memorable formats: a bubble chart of books read for fun versus for work, a doughnut chart of how you like to learn, a personal languages icon set (spoken, technical, business), even a mock mountain-climbing achievement chart. None of these are mechanically taught as replicable templates, they are shown as inspiration, with the expectation that the learner will invent their own version.

Where the execution thins out

The three software segments are demonstrations, not lessons. Adobe Draw gets a quick tour of pens, shapes, layers, and the "send to Illustrator" button, but no structured exercise. Google Sheets and Slides cover building a doughnut chart and adjusting colors, useful but extremely basic, the kind of thing most spreadsheet users already know. Tableau Public is the weakest link: the course openly defers to outside tutorials rather than teaching the tool, showing only a finished timeline dashboard built from a flat spreadsheet of jobs, skills, and dates. Anyone hoping to leave with functional Tableau skills will need to look elsewhere, the course says as much itself.

There is also a real tension in the premise. The class argues against template-driven visual resumes, yet several of its own suggested formats (doughnut charts, Venn diagrams, bar timelines) are common chart types that a template library would also offer. The differentiator Madden is really selling is the underlying thinking process, decide on content and audience before format, not the charts themselves.

Who gets value

At under 45 minutes with no chapter markers for revisiting techniques, this plays more like a workshop prompt than a comprehensive class. It rewards someone who already has resume content and career history sorted out and just wants a different way to present it, particularly a designer or visual thinker who will enjoy the sketching exercise for its own sake. Someone hoping for a plug-and-play resume format, a beginner tutorial on any of the three tools named in the syllabus, or concrete advice on resume wording and content strategy will find comparatively little here. The class project, submitting a single chart, is appropriately scoped to the runtime, but it also means the finished course output is closer to a rough concept than a resume-ready asset.

What you will learn

• ·How to run a timed 'shitty first draft' sketching exercise to break creative block before touching software
• ·How to break traditional resume sections (contact info, objective, work history, skills, education, volunteer work) into simple chart concepts
• ·How to brainstorm nontraditional content like a personality-type radar chart, a reading habits bubble chart, or a tools/workspace map
• ·How to build a vector illustration in Adobe Draw on an iPad and hand it off to Illustrator for cleanup
• ·How to build a static doughnut chart and Venn diagram in Google Sheets and Slides with custom colors and labels
• ·How to set up a flat spreadsheet and build a basic interactive timeline dashboard in Tableau Public