CV Layout and Design - Every Control in the CV Builder

The CV Maker guide covers the workspace end to end. This guide goes deep on one part of it: the design controls in the Build tab, from picking a template to fine-tuning what appears at the bottom of page three.

Open a CV in CV Builder and stay on the Build tab. On a desktop screen you see the editor on the left and a live preview on the right. On a phone, a toggle switches between Edit and Preview. Everything below lives in the left pane.

The left pane has three parts:

1. The Settings panel at the top - template and page-level design.
2. A card for each section of your CV - order, visibility, column, and per-section display options.
3. Add a section at the bottom - re-add built-in sections and add custom blocks.

Changes appear in the preview as you make them, and your work saves automatically.

Choose a Template

Open Settings and expand the Template group.

The Template dropdown lists 13 designs, each with a short description. Templates you haven't unlocked are shown with a badge naming the plan that includes them:

Eight of the 13 templates have a photo slot: Modern Sidebar, Hero Band, Wedge Header, Timeline Classic, Banner Icons, Card Header, Split Portrait, and Bento Grid. The other five are text-only. Switching to a text-only template does not delete your photo - it simply isn't shown, and it comes back if you switch to a template that supports one.

Below the template picker, the Layout toggle switches between 1 column and 2 columns. Every template supports both, so a one-column design like ATS Classic can be given a sidebar, and a sidebar design like Modern Sidebar can be flattened into a single column. Some templates start as two-column, others as one.

If you need to get past applicant-tracking software, start with ATS Classic in one column. Its whole job is to be boringly machine-readable.

Colour, Font, Density, Dates

Expand the Appearance group.

• Colour - a row of palette swatches. There are 26 in total; each template shows its own recommended palettes first, then the rest. Free plans have 5, Starter 15, and Pro and Premium all 26. Locked swatches carry a small lock and a tooltip naming the plan that unlocks them.
• Custom colours (Pro and Premium) - if a palette is close but not right, set your own. Under Document you can set the accent colour, a soft accent, and the body-text colour. On a two-column template, a Sidebar group adds sidebar background, sidebar text, and muted-detail colours. Reset returns you to the palette. Clicking any preset swatch clears your custom colours, so save your hex values somewhere if you want to experiment.
• Font - a grid of 21 typefaces, grouped by family (modern sans, readable sans, system compatible, condensed, serif, monospace) and previewed in the typeface itself. Free plans have 4, Starter 13, Pro and Premium all 21. One font drives both headings and body text.
• Density - Compact, Default, or Comfortable. This moves the base text size and the gaps between sections together, which is why it's the single fastest way to pull a CV that spills onto a second page back onto one. (Line spacing is a separate Premium control - see Typography below.)
• CV language (titles) - Auto, German, English, French, or Italian. This translates the section headings only ("Work Experience" to "Berufserfahrung"), never your content. Auto follows the language detected in your CV. Use it when you're applying in a different language from the one your CV is written in, or after running a translation.
• Date format - 01/2021, 01.2021, Jan 2021, January 2021, or 2021-01 (ISO).

Margins

Expand the Page layout group. Two sliders set the page margins in millimetres, from 0 to 30:

• Top / left / right - one slider for all three.
• Bottom - set independently, which is what you want when a footer or a stray final line is crowding the bottom of the page.

Reorder, Hide, and Move Sections

Below the Settings panel, every section of your CV is a card. The icons on the right of each card header are where the layout work happens.

• Drag handle - grab it and drag the card to reorder. There are no up/down arrows; reordering is drag-only.
• Show / Hide (eye icon) - hides a section from the CV and the export. The data is kept - hiding is not deleting, and un-hiding brings everything back exactly as it was. This is the right way to keep a hobbies section on file but leave it off a formal application.
• Move to sidebar / Move to main column - appears on two-column layouts. Send skills and languages to the sidebar, keep experience in the main column.
• Show in preview - jumps the preview to that section. Useful in a long CV.
• Display options - per-section rendering choices (next section).
• Delete - only custom blocks have one. Built-in sections can't be deleted at all; hiding them is the way to take them off the CV.

Click a card to expand it and edit its content. Each expanded card also has a Section title field, so "Work Experience" can become "Selected Engagements" without touching anything else.

Three things worth knowing:

• Your personal details are pinned to the top. That card can't be dragged, hidden, or deleted - nothing can be placed above it. On two-column templates it can only be moved into the sidebar on Modern Sidebar; every other template owns the identity block in its own header.
• An empty section shows a greyed-out marker instead of the eye icon. If a section looks like it won't hide, it's because it has no content to hide.
• Switching template keeps all of this. Section order, hidden sections, column placement, and display options are stored on the CV, not on the template - so trying a different design is non-destructive.

Per-Section Display Options

Open Display options on a card to change how that specific section renders. These are available on every plan, and they do more for the look of a CV than most people expect:

• Skill style (tool skills) - Chips, Dots (1-5), Bars, or List.
• Language style - Inline, Dots (1-5), or Bars, plus a Language level display of text only, the CEFR code only, both, or no label.
• List style (professional skills, soft skills, hobbies, custom lists) - Bullets, Dot-separated, Dashes, or One per line.
• Link display (websites) - Category + URL, URL only, or Display name only.
• Reference layout - Compact, Contact rows, or Cards.
• Contact style (personal details) - Inline or Icon rows.
• Additional details - label style (text, icons, or both) and layout (inline or stacked).

Recruiter-facing tip: dots and bars look modern but communicate a self-assessment you may not want to defend. Chips and plain lists are safer for skills; keep dots for language levels where a scale is conventional.

Add Sections and Custom Blocks

The Add a section drawer at the bottom of the pane has two groups.

Built-in lists every standard section not currently in your CV - work experience, education, the three skills sections (tools, professional, soft), languages, achievements and projects, certifications, additional experience, hobbies, references, testimonials, websites, and a privacy statement.

Custom blocks are yours to invent, and there are four types:

• Text block - free rich text (bold, italic, lists, links). Good for a profile statement, a publication note, or a paragraph on your availability.
• List - a simple list of lines, rendered with bullets, dots, dashes, or plain lines.
• Descriptive list - key-and-value rows, rendered as a two-column table. Ideal for the DACH-style facts block: work permit, notice period, driving licence.
• Page break - forces everything after it onto a new page. It's a hard cut that overrides the automatic page-fitting, so use it when you want a section to start cleanly at the top of page two.

Despite the drawer's "add as many as you want" wording, there are limits: 20 content blocks (text, list, and descriptive list combined) and 6 page breaks. When you hit either, that entry in the menu is disabled and tells you the maximum.

Two-Column and Sidebar Controls

On a two-column layout, a Columns & sidebar group appears in Settings.

• Sidebar position - Left or Right. Available on every plan.
• Sidebar width (Premium) - a slider shown as a percentage of the page, within a range the template allows (commonly about 15% to 50%).
• Sidebar through (Premium) - the least obvious and most useful control in the whole editor. It sets how many pages keep the sidebar: Page 1, Pages 1-2, Pages 1-3, Pages 1-4, or All. The default is Page 1: a two-column CV runs the sidebar on page one and then continues full-width, which is usually what you want - your skills and languages don't need repeating beside page two. Choose All to keep the sidebar on every page.
• Accent continuation (Premium) - when the sidebar stops, this keeps a slim coloured strip down the edge of the later pages so they still read as part of the same document. It's on by default and unavailable when Sidebar through is set to All, since there's nothing to continue into.

If you've ever wondered why your sidebar vanishes on page two, this is why - and it's a setting, not a bug.

Typography (Premium)

Inside Settings, an Advanced section holds the fine-tuning controls. The Typography group has three:

• Section heading case - ALL CAPS or Normal.
• Line spacing - a slider from 1.0 to 1.5. Leave it on Auto unless you're fighting for space, then nudge it down.
• Section spacing - the gap between sections, from 4 to 28 pixels.

Each has a Reset that returns it to the template's own value. Between Density, line spacing, and section spacing you have three separate levers for fitting a CV to the page; change one at a time, and watch the preview.

Page Header and Footer (Premium)

The Page header & footer group controls what appears on pages 2 and beyond - it does nothing on a one-page CV.

Header on pages 2+ can show Name + role, Name, Role, or be Off. When it's on, you can set the Header size (Compact, Normal, Tall), the Header text size (Small, Normal, Large - independent of the height), and the Header alignment (Left, Center, Right).

Page footer turns on page numbers. With it on you can choose the Page indicator side (the name auto-aligns to the opposite side), switch on Name in footer, centre your Email, and set the footer's size and text size.

On two-column layouts, Header/footer span sets how wide the header and footer bands are drawn - across the Template, across Both columns, or over the Main column only.

A separate Column pagination group decides whether the secondary column reserves footer space and reserves header space on continuation pages. Turn the reservations off if the sidebar is stopping short of the bottom of the page for no visible reason.

Section Width and Flow (Premium)

Two more per-section controls appear in Display options on two-column templates:

• Column span - Auto, Inside columns, or Full page width. A wide table or a long project description often reads better breaking out across both columns.
• Row width - Auto, Full row, or Half row.

A section set to full page width can't also live in the sidebar, which is why the sidebar control disappears from that card.

The Preview

The preview toolbar has zoom in and out (25% to 200%) with a percentage readout, Fit width and Fit height buttons, and page navigation showing Page X of Y. The arrow keys page through as well, and you can drag to pan when you're zoomed in. The template name sits at the right.

There's also a Show margin guides switch in Settings, under Preview. It overlays dashed guides for sections, entries, and paragraphs. It's a tuning aid rather than a feature - turn it on when a layout is misbehaving and you want to see exactly where the boundaries fall.

Why the page breaks where it does. Pages aren't cut at a fixed height. The layout avoids splitting a single job entry across pages, keeps a heading with the block that follows it, and avoids leaving a section heading stranded at the bottom of a page. That's why a block sometimes jumps to the next page instead of filling the previous one to the margin. Content is never lost - pages are added as needed. If you want a break somewhere specific, add a Page break block.

Your work saves itself. A status pill shows Saving / Saved (and Save failed with a retry, if it comes to that). Layout and design changes save a few seconds after you stop making them, content a little later. Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on a Mac) forces an immediate save, and closing the tab flushes anything pending.

What Each Plan Unlocks

Everything in the section cards - reordering, hiding, moving between columns, custom blocks, page breaks, and every per-section display option - works on every plan, including Free. What increases with the tier is the design library and the fine-tuning:

Locked controls stay visible with a note about what unlocks them, so you can see what you'd be getting before you pay for it.

One consequence worth planning for: if you move to a lower plan, controls you no longer have are reset in the rendered CV. Your content is untouched, but Premium fine-tuning reverts to the template's defaults. Export a PDF of anything you want to keep exactly as it is before changing plans.

A Sensible Order to Work In

1. Pick the Template and the Layout (1 or 2 columns) - this decides the most.
2. Set Colour and Font.
3. Order your sections, hide what doesn't belong, and move the short factual ones (skills, languages) into the sidebar.
4. Set Display options per section - this is where a CV stops looking like a form.
5. Only now reach for Density, then Margins, then typography, to fit the page.
6. If the CV runs past one page, decide what Sidebar through should do, and whether pages 2+ need a header, a footer, or both.
7. Open the Export tab and download the PDF.

Next Steps

• CV Maker overview
• Improve, tailor, and translate your CV with AI
• Custom Word templates for motivational letters - a different feature; those templates don't affect your CV design.