CV Fonts and Layout: Making a Document Someone Can Actually Read

Most CV design advice is a list of approved fonts, which is the least important decision on the page. Nobody has ever been rejected for using Calibri, and nobody has ever been hired for using Garamond.

What does matter is whether the document can be scanned in six seconds by a tired person on a laptop. That is a question of size, spacing and hierarchy, and it is almost entirely mechanical once you know what to set.

This article is about the human reader. The separate question of what breaks the software is covered in the formatting that actually breaks an ATS, and the two rarely conflict.

Fonts, briefly

Pick one and stop thinking about it.

Safe and good: Calibri, Carlito, Helvetica, Arial, Source Sans, Lato, Open Sans among sans serifs. Georgia, Cambria, Charter, Source Serif and Garamond among serifs.

Avoid: anything decorative, anything condensed at small sizes, Comic Sans for obvious reasons, and Times New Roman not because it parses badly but because it is the default nobody chose, and at 10pt it sets tightly and reads tired.

Serif or sans serif makes no measurable difference to readability at CV lengths. Sans serif tends to look more current, serif tends to look more established. Both are fine.

One font is enough. Two is acceptable if one is used exclusively for headings and the pairing is deliberate. Three is a mistake.

The reason this section is short is that font choice is a rounding error next to the decisions below.

The numbers that actually matter

These are the settings that decide whether your CV reads easily, and most people never touch them.

Body text: 10 to 11.5pt. Below 10 you are asking someone to squint. Above 12 you are using space you will want later. If you find yourself at 9pt to fit everything, the problem is length rather than type size, and the answer is in how long a CV should be.

Section headings: 12 to 14pt, bold, and clearly larger than body text. The gap between heading and body size is what makes the structure visible at a glance.

Your name: 18 to 24pt. Large enough to anchor the page, not so large it becomes a poster.

Line spacing: 1.1 to 1.25. Single spacing at small sizes reads dense; 1.5 wastes a quarter of your page. This single setting improves more CVs than any font change.

Margins: 1.5 to 2cm on all sides. Below 1.2cm the page feels crowded and some printers clip content. Above 2.5cm you are giving away usable space.

Line length: aim for 80 to 100 characters. Full width text on an A4 page at 10pt runs long enough that the eye loses the line. This is one of the strongest arguments for slightly wider margins.

Space between sections: roughly 1.5 times your line height. Between entries within a section, about 0.75. The eye reads those gaps as grouping, and getting the ratio right does more for structure than any horizontal rule.

Hierarchy, which is the whole job

A reader scanning your CV needs to answer three questions in about two seconds: what is this section, what is this job, and who was the employer. Hierarchy is how you answer them without the reader consciously reading.

The working order, largest to smallest: your name, section headings, job titles, employer and dates, body text.

Each level should be distinguishable by one clear difference, and one is enough. Bold alone is usually sufficient to separate a job title from its employer line. Size alone is enough to separate a section heading from a job title. Using bold, larger size, colour, capitals and a rule line all at once on the same element is what makes a CV look busy.

Two specific things worth getting right.

Job titles should be more prominent than employers, unless you worked somewhere so well known that the name is the stronger signal. A reader is matching your role against the role they are filling.

Dates should be findable but not shouting. Right aligned on the same line as the employer works well, or immediately after it separated by a comma. What matters is that they are in a consistent position every time, so the eye learns where to look.

White space is not wasted space

The most common instinct when a CV runs slightly over is to shrink everything: reduce the font, cut the margins, tighten the line spacing. This makes the document technically fit and practically worse.

A dense page reads as effort. A reader with forty CVs to get through opens a wall of 9pt text and their willingness drops before they have read a word. The same content with room to breathe gets read.

The correct response to a CV that is one paragraph too long is to cut a paragraph. Almost every CV has three or four bullets describing duties that could go, and removing them improves the document twice: once by freeing space, once by removing weak material. Which bullets to cut is the subject of quantifying achievements.

Colour

One accent colour, used sparingly, is a genuine improvement. Two or more is a design project you did not intend to start.

Use it for section headings, or for a thin rule under them, or for your name. Not for body text, which should be near black for contrast and print reliability.

Choose something with enough contrast to remain readable when printed in greyscale, since a proportion of CVs still get printed for interview panels. Pale grey text is the most common accessibility failure on CVs, and it is also the one that disappears entirely on a photocopier.

Dark blue, dark green, deep burgundy and charcoal all work. Bright yellow, pale pastels and mid greys do not.

Layout patterns that work

One column, full width. The default, and the safest. Structure comes from spacing and hierarchy rather than from position.

One column with a narrow date column. Dates aligned right on the same line as the employer. Visually organised, and safe as long as the alignment comes from tab stops rather than a layout table.

Section headings with a rule line. A thin horizontal line under each heading is a small, reliable improvement, because it gives the eye a landmark when scanning downward.

Patterns to be careful with, for reasons of readability rather than parsing: full width justified text creates uneven word spacing and rivers of white on a narrow measure, so keep text left aligned. And skills rated with bars, dots or percentages take up space to communicate a self assessment nobody believes.

The details people miss

Consistent bullet characters. One symbol throughout, not three different ones inherited from copy and paste.

Consistent date format. Covered elsewhere for parsing reasons, but it is also a visual consistency issue: "Jan 2023", "01/2023" and "January 2023" in the same document looks careless.

No orphaned headings. A section heading at the bottom of page one with its content on page two is a small but visible failure. Move it.

No single line spilling to a second page. If your CV runs to two pages plus three words, cut the three words.

Alignment of everything down the left edge. Mixed indentation is the most common invisible reason a page looks untidy.

Hyperlinks styled readably. Default blue underlined links look like a web page. Set them in your body colour, or in your accent colour, without the underline.

Where the font can genuinely go wrong

Having said that font choice barely matters, there are three cases where it does, and they are all about the file rather than the taste.

A font you have that the reader does not. If you use a typeface installed only on your machine and send a Word file, the document reflows on their screen into whatever substitute their system picks. Line breaks move, your careful two page document becomes two and a half pages, and headings land in odd places. Exporting to PDF eliminates this entirely, which is the strongest practical argument for PDF and is covered in the PDF or Word question.

A font that does not include the characters you need. Some display typefaces lack accented characters, Turkish dotted and dotless i, German sharp s, or Cyrillic. The missing glyph either falls back to a mismatched font mid word or renders as a box. Type your own name and check it before committing to anything unusual.

A font too light at small sizes. Thin and light weights look elegant at 24pt on a designer's monitor and turn grey and unreadable at 10pt on a laptop or a printout. If you like a geometric sans, use its regular weight, not its light.

Outside these three, the taste question genuinely does not matter, and the hours people spend on it would be better spent on one more rewritten bullet.

Testing your own document

Three checks, all fast.

Print it, or view it at 100% on a laptop. Most people design a CV zoomed in at 150% on a large monitor, where everything looks generous. At actual size on a 13 inch screen the same document can be cramped.

Look at it upside down, or squint until the text blurs. What remains visible is your hierarchy. You should still be able to see where sections start and where job titles sit. If it blurs into a uniform grey block, your hierarchy is too weak.

Give someone six seconds. Show a colleague the first page for six seconds, take it away, and ask what job you currently do. If they cannot answer, the problem is not the font.

What good looks like

Putting it together, a page that works usually has these properties.

The name is unmistakably the largest thing. Four or five section headings are visible without reading. Each job entry has the same shape, so the eye learns the pattern once and then moves fast. There is enough space around headings that they feel like separators rather than just bigger text. The right margin is ragged rather than justified. Nothing on the page is smaller than 10pt. And there is visible empty space, which reads as confidence rather than as a lack of material.

None of that requires design skill. It requires setting six numbers once and then leaving them alone.

Accessibility, which is also just good design

A small section, because the changes are free and they help everyone rather than a minority.

Contrast. Body text should be near black on white. Mid grey body text is a stylistic habit borrowed from web design that fails on a printout and is harder for anyone reading in poor light.

Size floors. Nothing below 10pt, including dates and the small print at the bottom. If a section only fits at 8pt, it does not fit.

Do not rely on colour alone. If a coloured heading is the only thing marking a section, it disappears in greyscale printing. Pair colour with size or weight so the structure survives without it.

Real text, not images of text. This is an accessibility point as well as a parsing one, since screen readers and text to speech tools cannot read a graphic either.

Left aligned, not justified. Ragged right is easier to read, particularly for people with dyslexia, and it avoids the uneven word spacing that justification produces on narrow columns.

These five take about two minutes to apply and they improve the document for every reader, including the one skimming on a phone between meetings.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best font for a CV?

There is no best. Pick a clean, widely available typeface at 10 to 11.5pt and spend your attention on spacing and hierarchy instead.

Can I use a template from a design site?

Yes, if it is single column, has plain section headings, and keeps contact details in the body rather than the header. Many popular templates fail those tests for the reasons set out in the formatting that actually breaks an ATS.

Is it acceptable to use two pages?

Yes, for experienced candidates in most of Europe. What is not acceptable is two pages of 9pt text with 1cm margins, which is one page of content compressed badly.

Should I include icons?

Small icons beside contact details are harmless if the text next to them is real text. Icons used to convey meaning on their own are not, because the meaning disappears when the document is converted.

Do I need a designer?

No. A well set single column document in a standard typeface reads better than most designed CVs, because most designed CVs prioritise looking distinctive over being scannable.

What about a photo, visually?

Where the convention expects one, keep it small, aligned to the top block, and let it sit within the margins rather than bleeding to the page edge. It should not be the second largest element on the page.

Check how the page reads to a machine and a human

Design decisions that look fine on screen sometimes cost you a field when the file is parsed, particularly around columns, tables and headers. CvLaunch reads your CV and shows you the structured result, so you can confirm that a layout you like has not quietly lost your dates or your contact details. It takes a few seconds, it is free, and there is no sign up.