Part 2: Mentoring our Intern Designer

By AJ Picard: I run Sauce Design & Clava

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

I started this series because I couldn’t find any information on how to mentor an intern designer! I have never done something like this before so I decided to document my own experience. You can read part 1 here.

In part 1 I touched on the three principles I felt like you have to focus on in order for the mentorship to be a successful one.

These principle were:

1. Prepare
2. Encourage
3. Teach

Prepare

I already covered the Prepare principle, since I already generated a list of things I wanted to focus on during their internship.

Encourage

Let’s move on to the Encourage principle, our intern didn’t have any prior knowledge of designing or developing for that matter. My goal was to help our intern create their own portfolio website.

During this process what I tried to do what set up our intern for success. I generated a couple of low fidelity mockups to help generate ideas for the portfolio. We then generated ideas around these mockups for our intern to work on their own.

The results were exactly what we wanted. I wasn’t telling the Intern how to design but…