Core

Core is the template for sectors where credentials, not presentation, are the currency. In law, accountancy, medicine, and education, hiring is qualification-led and the resume is a record rather than a pitch. A visually assertive document in these fields does not read as confident — it reads as someone who has misunderstood the brief.

The absence of a coloured sidebar background is the deliberate distinction from Onyx, which is otherwise similar in structure. Core keeps the page uniformly white, so it prints and photocopies cleanly. This still matters more than it should: hospitals, courts, universities, and public bodies genuinely circulate printed candidate packs, and a heavy colour block that looks considered on screen turns into a grey smear on a shared office printer.

Serif typography is doing conventional signalling, not legibility work. Sans-serif is at least as readable on screen. But in credential-led sectors the serif convention is strong enough that departing from it registers as a small, unnecessary distinction — and you want the reader thinking about your qualifications, not about your font.

Two-column mode is worth using when you have a genuinely long credential list: bar admissions, clinical registrations, teaching qualifications, professional memberships. Those belong in a sidebar where they are scannable, rather than interrupting the chronological flow of your positions. If your credentials are short, stay single-column — an underfilled sidebar looks like a layout you did not finish.

One caution: Core and Zenith are both restrained, but they are not interchangeable. Core reads traditional; Zenith reads contemporary-minimal. In a conservative sector, traditional is the safer signal.