A new app called Vizualize.me will instantly turn your LinkedIn profile into a stunning infographic, all through the power of code — no graphic design skills required.
Pulling all your career information from your LinkedIn profile via LinkedIn’s API, Vizualize.me creates clean graphical representations of your skills, work history and even your connections in an easy-to-scan format that hiring managers and other gatekeepers love.
To get the data from text to graphics, Vizualize.me scrapes your positions, education, interests, skills, recommendations and number of connections from your LinkedIn profile, assuming all that data has been entered already. Then, attributes such as skills are weighted by the level of expertise you’ve attained and how many years you’ve been using it.
Those “weights” are then used to create a visual representation of your professional experience to date, where each of your abilities is accurately portrayed relative to your other talents.
Best of all, the resulting infographic-like resumes are customizable, too. While Vizualize.me is in beta, users will be able to choose from a variety of different themes and templates, both free and premium. Eventually, users will also be able to specify their own colors and typefaces, too. Think of the app as a Flavors.me for your professional life.
How Vizualize.me Works
Being able to accomplish this task programmatically was a problem that intrigued Vizualize.me creator Eugene Woo. In an interview with Mashable, Woo said, “We are developing something that intersects software with design in a very big way.”
Woo, who has a background in electrical and computer engineering, pulled the idea out for a recent Startup Weekend event in Toronto. He said the app uses SVG — that’s “scalable vector graphics,” an XML family of specs for static and animated vector graphics — and will continue to do so until HTML5 Canvas becomes more widely adopted.
“I think our biggest challenge isn’t so much the technology but making sure that what we create enough flexibility and options so that the generated inforgraphics don’t all look alike.”
In addition to getting a lot of positive feedback from early users, Woo said he’s also “had a lot of interest from hiring managers and business owners. In the near future, we’ll take it to the B2B segment.”
http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/vizualize-me/
