Want to become a better designer? Mentor design students
A couple of years ago, I found myself musing about the idea of helping students. As a former student myself, I looked up at professional designers as these rare entities, people that had overcome the natural fears of showing their work to the world, knew everything about how to guide their careers, and always had the right ideas. It seemed like the biggest challenge at the time. It’s no surprise I appreciated when more experienced designers gave me their feedback or helped me when I needed guidance.
I started to feel that maybe my professional experience could be helpful to forthcoming generations. Fast forward to 2018, and after having mentored over 20 students, I realized that it was as equally, if not more, enriching to me as it was to my mentees.
If your professional career is anything like mine, chances are you spent the first few years on the receiving end of a feedback session. You had to learn to listen to it, take it as a critique of your work and not on you as a person and evaluate it. Once assessed, voiced your opinion if you disagreed, and moved on.
Then, one day, things begin to change. As you become more experienced, you are the one giving feedback. And when you thought that was the easy part when it comes to all things feedback, you quickly find out you are wrong.
There’s a natural feeling of vulnerability that comes when you open your work to others, and most students are doing this for the first time in their lives. Evaluating others’ work is not easy, you have to treat their work with respect, and how you phrase your feedback is key. Mentoring a design student, or a junior designer is a great way of improving this. It forces you to justify your point of view, to communicate why something is or is not working, and to make it constructive by suggesting how would you take that work further. If you have been an inexperienced designer, you know how it feels. Mentoring is about empathizing with them.
No matter how good you think your feedback is, it will all be useless if the means to transmit those ideas are not adequate. There are best practices you can always use in order to get your point across. For example, asking for their rationale about something specific may reveal a lack of understanding that you can elaborate on, making it a valuable moment for them to remember a concept instead of focusing on a negative comment.
Take that approach to your day to day, not only to giving feedback, and you will immediately see the value: if every time you make a design decision it is properly communicated, it takes your audience into account, and it is properly informed, your ideas will be better received. If you are a designer that works at a place where you don’t get exposure to these kinds of skills, mentoring is a very easy way to get better at it.
Although getting better at communicating is one of the advantages, it’s far from the only one. One of the things I admire the most about my mentees is the passion and hunger they show when they talk about design. They are discovering concepts for the first time, and they approach them from a completely blank slate. As they learn different aspects of the design process, you can see the evolution in their work, and their growth is very fast. Looking at their progress over time is all the reward you will need.
Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to mentor students. There are multiple platforms that facilitate it. They connect students with mentors, you follow up with their work, give feedback and coordinate times to have 1:1 calls. There is also the possibility to sign up for portfolio reviews since many students have a hard time with portfolios. It’s a daunting task even for the most seasoned designers, so if you have interviewed candidates at your workplace, you definitely have good advice. Most of them haven’t had the chance to apply for a design job, and since they want to cause a good impression, that kind of advice is priceless to them.
If that sounds too complicated for you, or you don’t have the bandwidth to mentor people, you can always use your professional network and try to approach design schools. They are always happy to have guidance from professionals, and most of them would welcome you in their classrooms.
