My journey as a UI/UX Intern

Photo by Balázs Kétyi on Unsplash

So here’s how my design career started.

Sometimes in 2019, I kick-started as a student intern in my year three in University. My boss at the company I worked for at that time needed a logo for her personal brand and then reached out to me to get it done. At that time, I had basic design knowledge. I was able to get the task done after reaching out to a course mate, a fabulous graphic designer.

Truthfully, I’d describe my learning stage with him as an interesting one, that it hightened my interest in designing and ended up making me challenge myself to learn more.

I made researches, and watched several YouTube videos and tutorials just to foster this area of interest. I got really better.

While at that, I continued to design graphic ads for this same company and this made be obtain more practical and extensive experience in graphic design.

Subsequently, a kind man, my mentor, introduced me to UI design using Figma. He challenged that I was already getting more creative with my works and why not pick up UI design to see if I’d enjoy doing it. Guess what? I did! I mean, I loved it!

My First UI design; What do you think?

My First UI design

Looking back now, picking up UI design has been the best decision I ever made for myself, special gratitude to my mentor, Mr Daniel.

Fast forward to post school life (2022), I was hired by the same company I interned while I was in school but this time, as a graduate intern.

I was assigned two major projects at the beginning of the Q1; Knowledge base design and Workflow module. Working on these two projects was demanding but yet an interesting and insightful one. My team lead played a huge role in the realisation of this project as he walked me through a lot of things I didn’t understand.

Here’s one fantastic thing I learnt and adapted to, which has significantly contributed to my progress in this field:

Prior to this new job, my designs were majorly off my my head, after lots of brainstorming sessions, design thinking and few sketches. This time, I had to design from a design brief coming from the product team. This felt quite strange and tasking as I was just new to this approach. My team lead did not only take out time to put me through, but also made sure I understood them perfectly. He shared with me lots of design tips, books and tutorial videos which I am still currently studying.

Looking back at Q1, I have gotten better at designing off briefs and have mastered some design concepts and features.

Here are some of them:

Auto Layout

Auto layout made design much more easier for me. Auto Layout is one of the most important features in Figma, it allows you to structure components and frames in a way that can automatically grow, making the container adapt to the size of its contents, or the other way around.

This tool made working on the Knowledge base design very easy and smooth

Knowlegde base design is basically a documentation explaining how our product works to our customers and to enable them use the system efficiently without any need to reach out to the team.

Components

Components are elements you can reuse across your designs. They help to create and manage consistent designs across projects. My teamlead kept hammering on this tool and i just knew i had to master it.

Components helped me attain consistency in my design, from colors to spacing, button sizes, icons and layouts. After watching lots of tutorial videos and practicing, I felt more confident working on Workflow module which I must say I enjoyed everybit of the time I spent on this task.

Header component

Workflow Dashboard

The 8-Point Grid

Consistent design cannot be more emphasized on, using the 8-point grid allows you to define dimensions, padding, and margin of both block and inline elements.

When all of your measurements follow the same rules, you automatically get a more consistent UI. This method helped me as designer lay out UI elements quickly and consistently, my spacing got better which made my designs look better and well organized.

Looking forward

Q2 is upon us and I plan to learn more features, read more design books, watch more tutorial videos and take some online courses also.

Here are few things I am commiting to learn this quater, variants, constraints, prototyping, typography, color in UX and ultimately read more on User experience.

Conclusion

These tools have helped me grow as a designer.

As I work on tasks assigned to me, I make sure I work with these features and follow the design principles. Of course, sometimes, these rules feel like they are made to be broken depending on your creative intuition. But like your conscience, they are still there to guide you even when you break them.

If you read this far, kindly show love to that clap button. Will ya? Thanks.