Resume Place, Inc. has been the preeminent federal job experts since 1971: the first federal resume writing service, and the publisher of the Ten Steps to a Federal Job® curriculum that a generation of federal hires trained on.
In 1972, before there was a USAJOBS.gov, before there was a federal resume as a category, Resume Place placed its first ad in the Washington Post classifieds. "RESUMES. Excel. quality professional resumes, type-set & printed. The Resume Place. 298-7890." The studio was a print shop on K Street with storytellers on staff. People walked through the door with a job announcement and walked out with a federal resume.
Five decades later, Kathryn Troutman, who founded the business in 1971, still leads it. In 2024 Resume Place hired us to design the system that carries that history forward: a complete identity, the program marks behind the Ten Steps curriculum and its certifications, a rebuilt site, and a campaign program tied to the federal-news cycle. The brand carries fifty years of Washington-rule changes as a working credential.
See yourself in this work
If your organization has decades of earned authority and no visual system to carry it, this is what it looks like to build one without burning the trust you already have.
Resume Place writes federal resumes, publishes the Ten Steps to a Federal Job® curriculum, certifies trainers, and trains federal agencies. Each line arrived in a different decade and built its own materials, so the company looked like several companies, and none of them carried the fifty years of authority that is the actual asset.
The brief: an identity worthy of the original, a mark system for the programs the business actually runs on, a site a customer can navigate by business line, and a production rhythm that answers federal news as it breaks.
Audience
A federal applicant, a fed carrying a decade of accomplishments into the private market, or a senior leader facing ECQs, the executive-qualification essays OPM requires. Arrives alone, at a high-stakes moment, and decides in minutes whether these people have done this before.
A contracting officer or workforce-development lead buying ECQ workshops and curriculum on a government rate and a government timeline. Needs capability statements, a GSA schedule, and receipts that survive a compliance review.
An educator who earned the credential and teaches the method in transition offices and resource centers. Both the audience and the brand’s extension into the field, carrying its marks onto rooms and websites Resume Place does not control.
One visual language had to hold all three without changing how the company looks for each one.
Twenty years of Washington Post ads read as the company becoming itself: one line in the typing column in 1972, a display ad by 1974, the SF-171 specialty by 1981, a listed seminar by 1988, SES leading by 1993 with Kathryn Troutman signing as owner.
We read this archive before drawing anything. The order of the business in 2024, resumes into curriculum into training, is the order the classifieds established fifty years earlier.
These are Resume Place’s own materials from before we were hired. Each is shown whole, at its original size and shape, the way it ran.
The office albums had never been shown anywhere. This is the chapter we built for them, in the brand’s own colors and type: decade labels in the typewriter face, the scans at their original proportions on the dark background, and the family photographs that come with a business the founder still runs.
The site had accumulated the way twenty-year-old sites do: one-off links in the top menu that belonged to no section, a fourteen-item certification dropdown, the same links repeated across three menus. The founder set the constraint that fixed it, and she was right: every line of business is named at the top level, in descriptive words. Certification and government training are half of revenue. Each line has its own customer who arrives looking for that exact term.
Seven business lines and one call to action. Every section follows the same order: who we help, then services, then one priced next step. And nothing was lost. All sixty-five destinations in the production menu stayed reachable; we reorganized them. A structure that protects the search rankings fifty years of content earned.
When we started in 2024, the typical customer was someone applying for a federal job. By 2026, reductions in force and reorganizations across the government had changed that. Two groups moved to the front: feds leaving for private-sector work, and senior executives. The federal applicant is still the steady base of the business. Agencies and trainers still matter, just less often, so they sit lower on the list.
Each profile names what someone came to do, and what it costs them if it goes wrong. No biographies.
Audience
Priorities move with the federal-news cycle. The full set lives in the brand book at /brand/resume-place.
Persona · 01
Fed moving to the private sector · rising
A fed facing a reduction in force, or one who does not know yet whether the job is safe. A decade of real accomplishments in a resume built for USAJOBS, not for a recruiter who reads it in six seconds.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 02
SES candidate or senior leader · rising
Applying to the Senior Executive Service or carrying executive-level experience into the private sector. ECQs, the five-page narrative, the two-page executive resume. Higher stakes, heavier documents.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 03
Federal seeker, GS-7 through GS-15 · core
Real accomplishments and no clear way to fit them into a federal resume. OPM rules, GS levels, and a USAJOBS form that does not reward modesty. The base the whole business is built on.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 04
Agency HR and workforce development
Buys ECQ workshops, trainer certifications, and curriculum on a government rate and a government timeline. Needs a partner who can show the receipts.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 05
Ten Steps certified educator
Teaches the federal job search using the Ten Steps curriculum in resource centers, transition offices, and private practice. Both the audience and the brand’s extension into the field.
Needs
Pushes back on
The consultation form is where the site turns visitors into clients: five steps, ending in a choice. Pay now and go straight to checkout, or ask for a quote and keep a payment link that holds the reservation until the client is ready. Both paths follow the same rules, and we tested every one of them end to end before the new site went live, every email included.
User flows
Every form stores a private record before any email is attempted. A mail failure never loses a lead.
Every business line ends in a single clear next step with a price on it: the $210 consultation, the $260 SES hour, the certification registration.
A client who is not ready gets a private payment link in the confirmation. Staff can forward it; clicking it adds the exact service to their cart and keeps the record linked.
No sign-up required up front. The account is created at the first purchase, and earlier form submissions attach to it once the email is confirmed.
The company name, set as a logo, is the primary mark. The circle-checkmark symbol works as a separate shorthand: the box on the form, checked. It stands alone on banners, certificates, and the screens of the online tools, and it rarely pairs with the name. When both appear together, the approved combinations do that work.
How much empty room the logo needs is measured off the logo itself: the height of the R around the name, the gap inside the checkmark around the symbol. Rules a client can apply without calling us.
Marks
The two main logos, in their three approved versions each, shown from the same master file the brand book uses. Clear space is measured off the marks themselves.
Wordmark
The primary brand mark. Use for the largest and most recognizable applications.
Logomark
The circle-checkmark logomark. Shorthand for the identity. Used at small sizes and on collateral where the wordmark would crowd the layout.
Logomark + Wordmark Lockup
Use the documented lockup files when both marks need to appear together.
Fifty years of federal credibility needed institutional weight without reading like an agency itself. Tangelo Orange holds the recognition the brand already owned; the Deep and Midnight Blues carry the seriousness a government buyer expects. Eleven colors, each matched to a standard print ink, because this brand still prints: books, certificates, capability statements.
Color
The four colors that do the most work, drawn from the full set of eleven. Eleven colors are matched to standard print inks, because this brand still prints.
Messina, from Lineto, is a complete family. The Sans does the everyday text and the Serif takes the magazine-style moments. Mono is there for the OPM and SES shorthand this audience reads daily. All three were drawn together, so they share the same proportions and the same underlying shapes and can sit on one page without clashing. A book interior and a web form never disagree about what a heading is.
Type
The headline, body, and data settings, all drawn from the same family. One family covers a book interior and a web form.
Cut-and-dried but certainly not dry or dull.
Brand character · Brand book v1.1
Most customers meet a program before they meet the company: a Ten Steps class, a trainer certification, a free builder. Each program needed a mark that can stand alone on a partner’s slide deck or a military transition office wall and still resolve to Resume Place up close. We drew eighteen approved logo combinations across four systems: Ten Steps to a Federal Job®, the CCAR Accomplishment Builder, the Executive Leadership Training Program, and Online Learning.
The certification badges came out of that same work: ornamental seals redrawn as clean, simple shapes, one tier for Certified Trainer & Coach, one for Master Certified. A trainer puts that badge on their own site, so it has to survive at the size of a browser-tab icon and still look earned.
Sub-brands
Ten Steps carries the most weight, so its logos keep the older elements the trainer community already knows, the banner, the stars, the flag, and set them in the new color with the new checkmark symbol. The full set, with motifs and considerations, lives in the brand book.
Curriculum + Certification Program
The Ten Steps shelf is one of the most prominent ways customers engage with The Resume Place, through the many book editions, training sessions, and the sheer wealth of information and opportunity associated with the brand. Familiar design elements from the previous Ten Steps brand (banners, stars, flags) are combined with new brand elements (color, logomarks) to enforce the connection between the Resume Place's legacy and its future.
Free tool, Resume Toolbox family
Part of the Resume Toolbox family. A simple encapsulation of the brand typography used for other familiar products and programming. The straightforward box motif around 'BUILDER' links the product back to the family of tools.
Design System
Every logo, color, and type setting lives in one master file. The brand book, the website, and the resume tool all read from it, so they cannot drift apart.
Wordmark
The primary brand mark. Use for the largest and most recognizable applications.
Logomark
The circle-checkmark logomark. Shorthand for the identity. Used at small sizes and on collateral where the wordmark would crowd the layout.
Logomark + Wordmark Lockup
Use the documented lockup files when both marks need to appear together.
Brand Pillars (Messaging)
The three things this brand always says. Every piece of work comes back to one of them.
The heritage promise
Over fifty years of responding to Washington’s changing rules, regulations, and culture. The brand treats that history as a working credential: the archive opens the story, and the system carries it forward.
The product promise
Giving people the tools to transform their careers, and guiding leaders in finding the most qualified candidates. The Ten Steps curriculum, the builders, and the certification programs are the institution in practice.
The voice promise
Empowering people to advance themselves by properly highlighting their talents, skills, and accomplishments. The voice stays charismatic and plainspoken: authority without urgency, translation without diminishment.
The v1.1 book was delivered in September 2024 and then kept living. Every change is tracked and dated the way software is, and the book updates the moment we change it. Alongside the human-readable book, the brand publishes a version AI tools can read directly, plus a ready-made set of instructions with banned and preferred words, so those tools can write on-brand copy without a designer reviewing every piece.
Federal hiring rules change, and the brand answers in kind: a banner program on a monthly cadence against OPM guidance and hiring-rule shifts, a newsletter, and the book covers, certificates, and presentation decks that carry the system into print.
Print leads with Tangelo. Screens invert it. On screen the dark blues become the background, the book-cover blue does the work for links, page numbers, and whatever you are currently on, and the orange appears once per page: the main button. The same family does the structure, Messina Serif for headlines, narrow capitals for menus and labels, Mono for data only.
The sections below are built from the same master file the brand book reads.
A two-page federal resume, set in the system, in two treatments. The document is the paper itself: ink on white, one navy rule, serif heading, typewriter face for federal data, readable by resume-scanning software, no orange. The screen around it is the navy workspace: match score, keyword coverage, format checks, and the one spot of orange, on a missing required keyword.
Same colors and type as the marketing tile. The difference is discipline: inside the paper, the system goes quiet so a machine can read it. Around the paper, it speaks.
Inside the document: ink, one navy rule, no bleeds, no orange. If a machine can’t parse it, the design failed. The brand lives in the frame.
Grade, hours, salary, supervisor, dates. The fields that make a résumé federal are the fields that earn the monospace, set as a bordered strip on every job.
One signal color in the body, and only on a quantified result. Everything a hiring manager should catch in six seconds is bright-blue, nothing else competes.
The accent never decorates the résumé. It appears once, on a required keyword that’s missing, because the brand’s job is to point at the next thing to fix.
The rebuilt site as it runs: the opening screen that asks the visitor a question, with the proof numbers in serif, one consultation section per page, the navy sections explaining the method, and the book shelf. Navy is the background; tangelo appears once per page. Full pages, scroll inside the windows.
The certification section puts the program logos from the brand book onto a real page section: the credential logo, the tiers, and the look the trainer community recognizes.
Since 2002 we have certified career counselors, workforce staff, and HR teams to teach federal resume writing and the federal job search. A three-day program, train-the-trainer, with the books, the agenda, and the credential to run it yourself.
3-day certification · curriculum + license included
For workforce, employment, and transition counselors who teach the federal job search.
For coaches and HR staff who write and review the federal resume one-on-one.
The Resume Place helps people write new chapters in their story of service and commitment to America.
Brand manifesto
The system is live
Every color, logo, and example on this page comes from one file. The brand book is that file, laid out for people, with a version machines can read. The whole system takes about ten minutes to read.
See yourself in this work
If your organization has earned its authority and the brand no longer shows it, start with the identity and let it decide the rest.
Before
Fifty years of credibility, three audiences with three different looks, a fourteen-item dropdown, and a brand book that lived in a PDF.
After
One identity, eighteen program logos, a site organized by business line, a live brand book at a URL, and a campaign program that answers federal news monthly.
Brand stage
Project shape
Vertical
Scope
Duration
The marks, the palette, the type, and the designed work that carries them. One source feeds the live brand and this wall. Click any tile to open it.
WordmarkmarkLogomarkmarkLogomark + Wordmark Lockupmark
2025 DeterminationCampaign Creative
2025 Merit HiringCampaign Creative
2025 New GraduateCampaign Creative
2025 Ses Ecq UpdatesCampaign Creative
2025 TransitionCampaign Creative
2026 CapabilitiesCampaign Creative
Federal Resume Guidebook BackPublication Design
Federal Resume Guidebook FrontPublication Design
Three Books StackedPublication Design
Triple Magazine MockupPublication DesignLive brand book
Tokens, voice, components, and patterns rendered from the source on disk. The same record powers this engagement, the product, and the agents on stack.
