From Intern to Impact: How Mentorship Shapes Our Work (and Our Website)

Mentorship in motion: How an intern’s design system helped shape the Brady UX brand.

We don’t just teach design — we invite people into the process. When Lizzie Toto joined us as an intern, we weren’t entirely sure what the experience would become. In truth, it was part experiment, part opportunity, and part test — for all of us. But what unfolded was something deeper: a real-world mentorship that left its mark not only on Lizzie, but on our studio as a whole.

From day one, we tried to make it real. Real projects, real pressure, real feedback. Real collaboration. We didn’t have a steady stream of billable client work at the time, so we revived our Design Alchemy initiative — offering free design to impactful startups as a way to sharpen our skills and create learning opportunities. That’s how we brought Storytime AI into the fold, and Lizzie jumped in immediately.

She made her mark on the platform's navigation system, helped build the page layout structure, and contributed heavily to our early thinking around component consistency. She also joined in testing sessions for 1st90, offering feedback and poking at the product like a true UX practitioner in the making.

But her biggest impact?

That would be her capstone project — a full design system (well, style guide, technically — but let’s give credit where credit’s due) for Brady UX itself. She crafted a visual language in Figma that helped us define our brand’s direction just before we launched a major marketing campaign. It might not have been the most glamorous project, but it was foundational. That guide gave us a vocabulary to work with — type styles, colors, component spacing, layout logic — and many of those decisions are still baked into what you see on bradyux.com today.

Lizzie also quietly took on the Secretome Therapeutics site, helping bring the brand to life in WordPress, solving layout issues, and staying open to feedback at every turn. That project wasn’t easy — we knew it — but she showed up with patience and humility, two traits we value more than polish.

The truth is, internships like Lizzie’s are rare. Not because they don’t happen — but because most places don’t slow down long enough to make space for them. We did. And we’re better for it.

We didn’t get a formal case study from Lizzie (next time, we’ll ask), but what we did get was insight, structure, and momentum. That’s more than enough.

She’s moving on now, and we’re proud. Proud of the work. Proud of the growth. Proud of the fact that mentorship isn’t something we pitch — it’s something we practice.

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