Creative cover letter
Colour, a matching header, sometimes a sidebar. Worth remembering that most systems will take this letter as a text box and throw the design away before anyone sees it.
What this layout usually means
- A header matching a creative résumé
- Colour blocks, sometimes a two-column layout
- Icons for contact details
- Occasionally a portfolio thumbnail
What happens when a machine reads it
Not an opinion about design. These are the things a text extractor does with a page, and you can watch ours do them to your own file at the bottom of this page.
- The form takes text
- When the letter goes into a text box rather than as a file, every design decision in it is discarded. What is left is the writing, which is what it should have been competing on.
- Columns in a letter
- Prose in two columns extracts as interleaved half-sentences. A résumé at least survives as fragments; a letter becomes unreadable.
Usable with care
Fine as an attachment in a design field where somebody will open it. Keep a plain-text version, because that is the one most forms will take.
Write one instead
Our builder writes the structure above, exports as PDF, Word or plain text, and shows you what a parser reads back as you type. Free, no account, and the download is not the paywall.
Open the free builderOr check the one you have
Drop it here and see the text a screening system gets — which sections it finds, which it loses, and what it decides you do for a living. Read in this tab; nothing is uploaded.
Your file is read by code running in this tab. It is never sent anywhere, and we never see it. Open your browser’s network tab and drop it again — you will see no upload.