The other day I saw a on tweet from Dennis Gaebel also known as @gryghostvisuals, from grayghostvisuals.com, who wanted to give back to community by offering mentoring. For a while I had been looking to learn from someone better than me, so I jumped at the opportunity.

A couple of days before I had bumbed into his website, and knew that like me, he does both, design and development. I think our interests align really well in web development topics like SVG-animations and interaction design, so Dennis seemed like a good choice for a mentor! He has also done fantastic job in the form of polylion which was featured on CSS-tricks.com and got me following him on twitter in the first place.

I have always been working as either the lead designer, or among peers of similar skill level, so I had never gotten much advice from senior designers. So to me, this was excellent opportunity to get the design critique from a more experienced and skilled designer.

I took the chance and tweeted him back "Where does one apply?"

Dennis replied, we got to talking, exchanged a few e-mails and now I officially have mentor, which I'm super stoked about! Thanks Dennis for mentoring me!

Already after a few days Dennis has already given me valuable feedback on my designs, as well as public presence, open source projects, and introduced me to GSAP, the JavaScript animation framework. He also kindly invited me to Dribbble, where you can expect to see my debut shot soon.

For my part I can say that I'm really looking forward to learning from Dennis, and hopefully occasionally be able to give something back to him. I think it's going to be a tremendous help to get design validation and advice for your design decisions when in doubt. In general, I feel that this whole mentor-mentee thing gets you to think more about design/development related topics.

Read about Dennis' thoughts on mentoring here

If you'd like to hear some occasional thoughts on how being mentored is like, I'm @modipeluri on twitter