Visual Resumes are cool

Some years ago, during the course of one of my regular Google image searches for inspiring designs, I discovered Visual Resumes (aka. Infographic Resumes) like this one from Michael Anderson. I immediately fell in love. And of course, I quickly set out to create my own in R. The result is a new package called VisualResume. The main function in the package, VisualResume() will create a visual resume like the one below for our favorite anti-hero Walter White:

Intallation

Version v0.1.0 of VisualResume is available on GitHub at http://www.github.com/ndphillips/VisualResume.

To use VisualResume, first, install the package from GitHub:

install.packages("devtools") # Only if you don't have the devtools package
devtools::install_github("ndphillips/VisualResume")

VisualResume()

The main function in the package is VisualResume(). When running VisualResume() you need to include several arguments that specify the content, size and location of the plotting elements. The function will automatically format the resume to fit your specifications.

Critical arguments:

Here are the critical arguments to the function:

Argument Definition
titles.left, titles.right Character vectors (length 3) indicating the header titles
timeline A dataframe with columns title, sub, start, end, side. The title and sub columns are character, start and end are integer, and side is binary (0 = bottom, 1 = top).
events A dataframe with columns title, year specifying important events (e.g.; publications).
interests A list of named character vectors specifying interests. The more often a value occurs in a vector, the larger it will be displayed.

Optional arguments

Here are some of the optional function arguments that will either add new elements to the plot, or adjust the attributes of existing elements.

Argument Definition
timeline.labels Character vector (length 2) indicating labels for the top and bottom of the timeline
events A dataframe with columns title, year specifying important events (e.g.; publications).
interests A list of named character vectors specifying interests. The more often a value occurs in a vector, the larger it will be displayed.
milestones A dataframe with columns title, sub, year specifying some milestones (e.g. degrees earned).
titles.right.cex, titles.left.cex Numeric vectors specifying the size of the header titles.
year.steps An integer specifying the step size between year labels.
col, trans The color, and transparencies, of timeline elements

Customising timeline locations

VisualResume() will do its best to put plotting elements, like boxes and boxes, in reasonable locations in the timeline. However, it won’t be perfect. In some cases, labels might overlap or just not look very elegant. If this happens, you can specify some plotting parameters in the timeline dataframe by including the columns box.x0, box.x1, box.y1, box.y2, which control the locations of the boxes, point.x, point.y which control the locations of the points, and label.x, label.y, label.dir which specify the locations and direction of the labels. See the help menu?VisualResume for additional details.

Walter White’s Visual Resume

Here is the code that generates the visual resume for Walter White (my apologies for any errors in the data!):

# Walter White's Visual Resume

VisualResume::VisualResume(
titles.left = c("Walter White, PhD", 
                "Chemistry, Cooking, Pizza", 
                "*Built with love in R using the VisualResume package: www.ndphillips.github.io/VisualResume"),
titles.left.cex = c(3, 2.5, 1),
titles.right.cex = c(3, 2.5, 1),
titles.right = c("www.lospolloshermanos.com", 
                 "[email protected]", 
                 "Full Resume: https://ndphillips.github.io/cv.html"),
timeline.labels = c("Education", "Employment"),
timeline = data.frame(title = c("Grinnell Col", "Ohio U", "U of Basel",
                                "Max Planck Institute", "Old Van", "Gray Matter",
                                "Sandia Laboratories", "J.P. Wynne High School", "A1A Car Wash"),
                      sub = c("BA. Student", "MS. Student", "PhD. Student", 
                              "PhD. Researcher", "Methamphetamine Research", "Co-Founder", 
                              "Chemist", "Chemistry Teacher", "Co-Owner"),
                      start = c(1976, 1980.1, 1982.2, 1985, 
                                1996.5, 1987, 1991, 1995, 2001),
                      end = c(1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1998, 
                              1992, 1995, 1998, 2003),
                      side = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0)),
milestones = data.frame(title = c("BA", "MS", "PhD"),
                        sub = c("Math", "Chemistry", "Chemistry"),
                        year = c(1980, 1982, 1985)),
events = data.frame(year = c(1985, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000),
                    title = c("Contributed to Nobel Prize winning experiment.",
                              "Honorary mention for best Chemistry teacher of the year.",
                              "Created Blue Sky, the most potent methamphetamine ever produced.",
                              "Made first $1,000,000.",
                              "White, W., & Pinkman, J. (2000). Blue Sky: A method of [...].\nJournal of Psychopharmical Substances, 1(1),.")),
interests = list("programming" = c(rep("R", 10), rep("Python", 1), rep("JavaScript", 2), "MatLab"),
                 "statistics" = c(rep("Trees", 10), rep("Bayesian", 5), rep("Regression", 3)),
                 "leadership" = c(rep("Motivation", 10), rep("Decision Making", 5), rep("Manipulation", 30)),
                 "Chemistry" = c(rep("Bio", 10), rep("Pharmaceuticals", 50))),
year.steps = 2
)

Bug-reports

This package is very young and likely contains many bugs and room for improvement. Please submit bug reports and feature requests at https://github.com/ndphillips/VisualResume/issues