Part 1: Mentoring our Intern Designer
By: Aj Picard
Tags: Intern, Mentorship, Designer, Internships, Mentoring

By AJ Picard — I run Sauce Designs & Clava App

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

It’s been a month since I’ve brought on our first design intern to help out with tasks for both Sauce Designs & Clava App. Before I started recruiting our first intern I was doing a ton of research on how to be great mentor.

There were so many articles I went over that provided a bunch of valuable information & tips to use. In this article I wanted to share what I’ve done so far throughout this process.

Here are the three rules I live by when it comes to mentorship so far:

Prepare Encourage Teach

Rule #1 — Prepare

Before our intern officially came on board I created a page in Craft (www.Craft.do ) that contained all of account login information that the intern would need access to. By the way I use Craft & Notion to keep my businesses organized, if you haven’t checked out these apps I suggest you do. You can view a review I did on Notion here, I will be doing a review on Craft soon (give me a follow so you don’t miss out).

Anyway, back to what we were talking about… I created a page for the intern that would contain their goals, articles/resources they can explore, along with their tasks.

I wanted to have all of this ready to go so that the intern wouldn’t waste any time looking for account information or anything else that would disrupt their onboarding experience.

This helped save time in the long run and it makes your company look more organized/put together.

On top of putting these documents/pages together I went ahead and found the times in both our schedules that we could sit down and have 1 on 1 meetings. I aim for at least 3 times a week or more and at the minimum these meetings last an hour, some extend to 2–3 hours.

During these meetings we talk about the designs the intern has created from the tasks I assigned to them. We also breakdown strategies for marketing, design and development since these are all industries a designer can impact.

For the most part though, each meeting consists of us breaking down the designs that were created. I let the intern explain their work and then I give feedback, which is by far the hardest task to do throughout this process.

I never want to hurt anyones feelings when giving feedback so I follow up with questions like….

Why did you put this here?

Do you see anything that we could change in this section?

How can we make this stand out more?

I use these questions because it allows the intern to think of a solution on their own or it gives you the opportunity to guide them on the right direction instead of giving them the solution.

Rule #2 — Encourage

Once we had the intern up and running the next task was to encourage them to do the following:

Speak up if they have an opinion around a topic

Don’t second guess yourself when designing, make the design how you want to make it.

Don’t get discouraged, learning how to design is a process

The more the intern feels at home the more fun they’re going to have and the more willingness they will have to learn.

Tasks

The first task I gave our intern was to go through the process of designing their own app. The app they started designing is for a marketing agency which will focus on showcasing the agency’s work, their process and information about their agency.

I explained to them how the most important thing to do (in my opinion) is to lay down the framework for each page of the app first before you start designing.

We decided to start with the onboarding pages, so I drew a simple mockup for the intern to reference when they go to create their own:

I then went on to explain what the point of these onboarding pages were and how they usually range from 2–5 pages. The less pages it takes you to explain the app or the features inside the app, the better.

Once I was done breaking down the principles of Onboarding pages inside of app, I told the intern I wanted them to try to design their own onboarding pages.

After 3 meetings going over each design iteration, above is the final version of the interns onboarding pages. For a first timer… I thought they they turned out really well, I’ll let you be the judge!

Rule #3 — Teach

Obviously this is the most important rule of a Mentorship or why even offer an Mentorship in the first place.

I wanted to do everything in my power to make sure this Intern gained as much knowledge and experience during their time with us. I encourage you to take some time before you onboard an intern to write out everything you will teach this future intern.

I’m covering the following categories (below) throughout the internship by giving them real-life design tasks, like designing their own mobile app and portfolio website.

Going through this process will give them their own experience on each category below.

User experience design

Design Research

User interface design

User interface inspiration

Building websites in Webflow

Designing in Figma

Typography

Spacing

Color

Generating a color scheme

Creating a design system

Animation Principles

I believe the best way to learn how to design is by doing. That’s why a lot of the tasks we assign are mostly around doing/creating. At the same time though I’m still sharing tutorial video’s with them that they can watch at any time. These tutorial videos are around skills they’re not comfortable with yet (choosing a typography, designing cards, etc).

I drop these tutorials in our interns Craft page and then send a message letting them know there are new tutorials to check out. The intern gets the notification from Craft and can begin learning whenever they have some free time.

It’s a seamless handoff that allows the intern to learn at their pace instead of your own.

Conclusion

I’m only a month in of mentoring our intern, but I must say that I’m having a blast teaching. The best part about the mentorship so far is seeing the interns growth in just a month. Seeing them progress is what drives me to teach them more and more.

Looking forward to sharing an update when month two & 2020 come to an end, talk to you at the end of December!

Comment below some tips you use to mentor intern designers!