Verso: sidebar resume template
A full-height tinted rail carrying a solid accent header, with your roles in the wide column beside it. Skills and certifications move into the rail on their own.
Verso is PaperKit's sidebar resume. A tinted column runs down the left third of every page, topped by a solid block in the scheme colour that holds your photo, your name, your target role and your contact details, one per line, in reversed type. The wide column beside it carries your summary, experience and education under coloured headings, each with a hairline beneath.
- Audience
- Design · Marketing · Client-facing
- Colour schemes
- Indigo, Navy, Teal, Maroon, Olive
- Photo slot
- Yes
- Paper
- A4 and US Letter
Verso decides the split for you. List sections such as Skills, Languages, Certifications and Awards move into the sidebar on their own, and anything made of paragraphs or dated entries stays in the main column. It suits designers, marketers and product people who send their resume to a person and want it to look designed at first sight. It is a Showcase layout for sending direct, and it is free.
Pick Verso if…
- Someone will read this before any software does.
- Your skills and tools list is long enough to deserve its own column.
- You want a two-column resume without the main column becoming narrow.
- You have a professional photo and want it framed at the top of a sidebar.
What the sidebar costs you with software
- With two columns of text side by side, a parser has to guess the reading order. Some read straight across both columns line by line and mix your skills into your experience.
- The sidebar is a filled panel from the top to the bottom of every page, which a parser sees as a background graphic.
- Your name and contact details are reversed out of a solid colour block, the part of the page a parser most needs to read.
- When your lists outweigh your experience, Verso puts every section in the wide column so the sidebar does not dwarf the page. The tinted panel and the header block stay.
How much fits on one page
Moving skills and certifications into the sidebar frees the wide column for roles and bullets, so Verso holds more history than its two-column look suggests, around five roles. A long skills list is an advantage here. The tinted panel repeats on page two, so a two-page Verso resume still looks like one document.
When to use something else
A filled sidebar is a background graphic, and two columns make a parser guess at the reading order. For the portal copy of the same application, Margin gives a two-track look with your history in a single column and nothing behind the text. If you like Verso's coloured header but want one body column, Harbour has a band over a plain single column.
Verso works well for these roles
Marketing, design and product roles, where a long tools list earns a column of its own.
Questions about Verso
- Can I choose which sections go in Verso's sidebar?
- Not directly. Verso places sections by type: lists of skills, languages, certifications and awards go to the sidebar, and summaries and dated entries go to the main column. Inside each column, the order follows your section order in the editor, so moving a section up or down still moves it on the page.
- Where does my photo go on Verso?
- Centred at the top of the coloured block, in a circle above your name. It is optional; without it, the block starts with your name. The name is set smaller than on most layouts to fit the sidebar, so a long name wraps onto a second line.
- Is Verso a good choice for a UI or UX designer?
- For the PDF you email with your portfolio link, yes. Put tools such as Figma and your prototyping software in a grouped Skills section so they land in the sidebar, and keep case-study outcomes in the main column. For a job posted on a portal, upload a single-column layout and mention your portfolio in the summary.