Advice for studios and startups from design interns.
I’m graduating from California College of the Arts in Graphic Design this Spring. Along with my classes, the valuable work experiences were through design internships. In my 6 years at architecture firms, graphic design studios, and startups, I’ve collected advice from peers and my experiences to share with other fresh interns.
While there’s plenty of advice for interns, there isn’t a lot for employers from the perspective of interns. So I’ve asked my peers this question: “If you tell your employer one line of advice to improve the internship experience for future interns, what would it be?” The following are some of the responses.
Notify an intern candidate ASAP. Recruiters know this, but I’m stunned to receive an email three months post-interview. If you expect interns to follow up in the same manner, set an example.
Offer your intern a respectable wage. If you’re expecting to have your design intern work as an employee, pay more than your local minimum wage. San Francisco has one of the highest in the nation at $11+. Unpaid internships are out of the question. Give them an incentive to keep working for you instead of making pumpkin spice lattes.
Make the work days flexible. Interns that work part time that either have another obligation like school. Group consecutive part-time days that make sense, for a 3-day example: Mon, Tue, and Wed. It’s less choppy than a Mon, Wed, and Friday schedule. It’s harder to rebound when an intern is away from a project every other day.
Keep onboarding presentations short. Your introduction should be brief because too many new faces, company rules, and HR info, can be overwhelming for a new hire (especially at a large company). Give your intern a general guide, and let them organically educate themselves. Provide internal resources and guides that are accessible anywhere.
Learn your intern’s name. Learning new names is hard, but make sure you introduce your intern to the rest of your co-workers.
Prepare for your new intern. An intern doesn’t want to waste time configuring technology themselves. Have the software and hardware already installed and intern projects lined up. Get Sketch installed and buy licenses for Adobe CC.
Where is your style guide? Type sizes? Color hex values? File naming? Your intern can’t begin to produce work until they have the kit of parts. An intern wants to impress you — not to use educated guesses with a hovering art director behind them.
Give your intern multiple tasks to establish an efficient workflow. Sometimes work with clients can be at a standstill, and if there’s other things in the pipeline, less time will be wasted in poking dead pixels. An idle intern compacts with the devil.
Engage your intern with other teams. Encourage communication between teams to break down barriers that could prevent communication breakdown. Get your Visual Design intern to work with the User Experience team — internships are all about playing the field.
Trust your intern. Give them a project to lead with full responsibility. Nothing says I trust you more than autonomy. It could be a poster for a gallery show, a UI design workshop for developers, or a logo rebrand. You’ll rapidly learn the strengths and improve your intern’s weaknesses.
Deliver the work. This is easy for employers to gloss over because interns are not expected to produce finalized work. Projects that are finally delivered to the public allow your intern to take pride in the work they have done for your company.
If you’re an intern, what advice would you give to employers?
If you’re an employer, do you agree with the advice?
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