Want to frustrate the living hell out of a designer (especially a Mac-based designer)? Require him/her to submit a résumé in MS Word DOC format.
I just spent most of the evening redoing my PDF-based (and Illustrator-designed) résumé in Word, only to discover that, hey, guess what… you can’t embed fonts in a Word document like you can in a PDF (apparently you can in older versions of Word for Windows, but that doesn’t help me). So pretty much all the nice typographic work I just did will go out the window if the receiving party doesn’t have Helvetica Neue on their computer. Well that’s just fun, isn’t it?
Why do some people require a DOC? I’ve noticed this recently on a few sites with job listings: Please submit in Word format. Why? Is there something completely abhorrent in PDF to these people? Have they never heard of it? Are these the same people that never signal while changing lanes in front of me?
p(note). One site even mentioned a long list of options including ASCII text and HTML, but no mention of PDF. Bizarre.