One of my major goals of 2020 was to successfully transition into UI/UX design from traditional graphics design, after working in the advertising industry for 3+ years. I carried out my research and enrolled in a number of courses at the beginning of the year. It was during my research, that I discovered the Hotels.ng internship — a space I could learn by doing.
I’d also seen that a number of the top designers in Nigeria were products of the Hotels.ng internship, so I applied to be part of the HNG 7.0 Cohort. I registered on the website and received an email that I’d been accepted. Over 10,000 interns joined the HNG workspace on Slack.
Everyone that joins the internship starts from stage zero, and to move to the next stage you have to complete the tasks given. We were given the commandments of the internship, and a while later we received our task. The tasks were relatively easy, so I was excited about promotion. Then Mark Essien, who is the primary design mentor said that design isn’t going to be easy because he was looking for the best. So to move to Design Stage 1 we had to do any of the following:
- Design an intro for HNG videos
- Design a bottom banner for HNG videos
- Design a single page app for electricians to send happy new month
I decided to do design No 3, and I submitted it quickly because in HNG time is of the essence and deadlines get shortened.
After submitting the design, It was not approved because I misinterpreted the brief. For the app, it was about Happy New Month automatically sent to your customers. It was about the flow in which the person will work. Not about the sending itself.
Anyways I quickly pivoted and designed No 1, which was the HNG video intro. That got me added to the Design Stage 1.
A little while after I was promoted, Mark noticed a lot of plagiarisms in the designs so the task was changed to: design a leaderboard. After my promotion, I helped other fellow designers in the program get promoted to Stage 1 by giving them feedback on their designs and advising them on how they could improve.
Ultimately at the end of Stage 1 promotion, we went from over 4000 designers to <1000 designers.
The highlight of the week was when Slack upgraded our HNG workspace for the duration of the internship, basically giving us a $50,000/month plan for free.
I’m grateful for this opportunity to be a part of HNG. The last few days have been both challenging and fulfilling. I have grown both personally and as a designer, met an ecosystem of other talented young designers whose work inspire me.
I am optimistic and looking forward to the next stage.
