Beyond products, the design discipline is now focused on creating services and experiences for highly diverse groups of people. Current and commonly used design approaches, like Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design, have empathy as a key component in their design processes. However, empathy is too often treated as an assumed trait of designers, one that has matured at the same pace as other skills. How are designers prepared to empathize with the people for who they work and design? The intent of this thesis is to better understand the importance of helping beginner and established graphic designers to engage in empathic practices before they are asked to empathize with users and clients. Some examples of empathic designs are analyzed, as well as existing design resources aiming to elicit empathic behavior. These referents inform the proposal of a digital tool that designers can use to explore their emotional intelligence, as it presents an important entry point to empathy that other resources have often overlooked.