Here is a cover letter I wrote for an application I submitted in February, 2021. I removed contact information and company identifiers for this public facing version.
Dear employer,
My name is Jacob Stephens, and I would like to work for your company. My experiences in graphic design, web development, and sociology come together to to form myself into someone well suited to work for you. You can find my portfolio at my website, stewardgoods.com.
Since 2019, I have worked as a graphic designer with Goodness Creative. I have laid out content in magazines, ads, mailings, books, and more using Adobe InDesign. I have edited photos with Photoshop, and I have created graphics with Illustrator. Melodee, the head graphic designer, taught me the importance and method of precision. Typing in sizes and locations of objects can be much more accurate than dragging boxes, hoping they click into the right spot. Melodee also has showed me how to maintain brand consistency. This has involved design processes that involve heavy reference to previous works done for particular clients. Further, work with Goodness Creative has offered me room to creatively bring ideas to life. I hear requests from clients and get to transform their words into images. I brought Goodness Creative’s vision for a website to life in my creation of goodness-creative.com. For goodness-creative.com as a WordPress site. I styled the site by using WP Rig to create a custom parent theme.
In 2020, to learn how to better work with content management systems like WordPress and to create a tool that manages data in the way I want, without using WordPress, I created artifacts.stewardgoods.com. This site is a tool with which users can manage artifacts and peoples’ responses to those artifacts. Developing this CMS involved me writing MySQL to create and interact with the site’s Bluehost hosted database. In order for the site to be able to use this MySQL, I wrote functions in PHP. To make the front end of the site I used a mix of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and PHP.
I majored in sociology At Gordon College. I learned about and interacted with a broad range of people groups, from people in poverty during my community development in a poor town in Mississippi, to Bosnian genocide survivors during my studies of war and peace in the Balkans. These wide-reaching studies and interactions expanded my understanding of the diversity of human populations, which helps me better imagine how an audience might react to a particular design or interface.
My sociological education, graphic design work, and web development experience come together to give me the skills and knowledge I need to perform excellent work for your company. I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you further about the position. You can reach me asynchronously at stewardgoods.com/message, or for synchronous communication schedule a Zoom, Google Meet, or phone call with me at stewardgoods.com/meet.
Thank you,
Jacob Stephens