The Hidden Dangers of DIY Graphic Design: Why Professional Design Matters
Canva, DesignWizard, Adobe Express, Inkscape… even the OG default Windows Paint… As a business owner, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of a multitude of advertisements for these DIY design apps and many more. These popular companies constantly bombard you with the enticing message that creating your own logos, brochures, advertisements, or pitch deck templates is ever so quick and easy. After a while, the draw to avoid working with a professional graphic designer and take on the task of creating marketing materials yourself can be irresistible.
Because popping a few graphics and text boxes onto a screen, changing some colors here and there, and clicking download sounds completely doable, right? What could be so hard about that? Three hours later (or three days, depending on how complex your design is!), you’ve discovered just how challenging graphic design can be. You’re frustrated, stressed, and have nothing to show for your time investment. Worse, you most likely end up with designs that are inconsistent, unprofessional, and ineffective sales tools. And sadly, as a novice designer, you may not even be aware of the damage your DIY marketing attempts cause to your business.
Even if you force yourself to carry on trying to design your own marketing materials, without spending quite a bit of time and money to educate yourself in graphic design, you’re unlikely to improve your skills. This is why the best choice you can make to market your business is working with a professional graphic designer.
1. Starting with the basics
According to research, you have just one-tenth of a second to make a first impression, and that impression sticks. Changing someone’s mind after their initial negative assumptions about your business takes far longer, if it’s possible at all. But a positive first experience makes converting clients from potential to actual both easier and quicker. That’s why first impressions are important. The way you present your company visually has an undeniable impact on potential clients.
Most clients have high expectations when it comes to the professional presentation of a company they’re considering working with, especially in a B2B context. A poorly designed logo, a hard-to-read roadside sign, or a website that is visually confusing will most certainly result in lost business—business you didn’t even get the chance to pitch! Accepting the loss of a deal to a competitor can be difficult enough. Still, when the reason behind their choice is an unprofessional visual presentation, the feeling of letting yourself down is amplified. A skilled graphic designer not only develops your marketing materials to attract attention and provide the good first impression you need, but also ensures that the design itself effectively sells your products and services.
Simply put, professional graphic designers are trained to know how to make your marketing take some of the burden of selling your plate. They understand how to use color theory, typography, and composition to communicate your brand values. An experienced, professional graphic designer has honed their creative skills for many years and is educated in the psychology and functionality of design. Part of maintaining their skills is staying up-to-date with new trends and best practices, ensuring your marketing materials remain fresh and modern. Trying to design on your own risks sending the message to customers that your operation doesn’t care enough about details to work with a graphic designer. Potential clients may even assume this means your business skimps on quality in other areas, too.
2. Providing strategic expertise
Beyond understanding the basics of good design, professional graphic designers know how to help you achieve your business goals through the correct use of branding. You likely spent a considerable amount of time crafting the mission, vision, and value statements for your business. Exemplifying those ideas and sharing them with potential clients likely comes relatively easily to you. Communicating those concepts visually is an entirely different task! DIY designs often lack the refinement necessary to convey professionalism, making it more challenging to establish credibility with potential clients.
A professional graphic designer is aware of the components that should be included and excluded in a design to represent your business appropriately, ensuring your marketing materials are on brand and messaging is on point. For example, you may be aware that different colors evoke distinct emotions and reactions in advertising. But do you know what those colors are and how combining them with others can encourage customers to associate your business with qualities like trustworthiness, innovation, or reliability? Probably not. You’re likely aware that Comic Sans and Papyrus are to be avoided at all costs in a professional setting, but do you know what font you should use? A professional graphic designer does!
The purpose of the marketing materials you create is to engage potential clients and make sales. When you step outside your zone of genius and try to do this yourself, the result can be a cluttered, confused look that doesn’t connect with, and may even alienate, your target audience. Professional graphic designers know how to lay out brochures and advertisements, so the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to the most important information. They know how to strategically place text and images to make your marketing material more effective.
DIY design tools can muddy your message and unnecessarily complicate your marketing efforts. A professional graphic designer delivers quality without the guesswork of what will connect with your audience.
3. Maximizing your investment
You invest time and money in your staff, research, and development. You diligently apply your expertise to achieving excellence with your products and services. Then, with nothing but the best of intentions, you try to sell those products and services using marketing materials designed by you, an amateur.
The goal of branding is to tell a cohesive story that accurately represents your business. The mistakes common for many nonprofessional marketers—awkward content, low-resolution images, and incorrect formats—can inadvertently send the message that you don’t know what you’re doing across the board. When you don’t understand the principles of marketing design, the materials you create undermine not only your marketing efforts but also your ability to achieve your business goals. Professional marketing conveys your professionalism!
Long-term success is dependent on building trust and demonstrating reliability to your customer base. Most customers want to work with well-established businesses they have confidence in, and that means presenting a consistent brand identity. The same look and feel across all your marketing creates positive brand recognition, associates your business with your specific product, and helps customers remember you when they need you. When your visual identity is unorganized and inconsistent, you weaken your brand recognition and undermine your customer relationships.
Maintaining a uniform, polished look for your marketing can be rugged without the help of a professional graphic designer. As a novice, you risk making design choices you don’t even know are mistakes. Unfortunately, marketing is not an isolated endeavor; it affects every part of your business. Ultimately, the effort you invest in growing your company will be wasted if your promotional approach is ineffective.
4. Saving you time, money, and stress
Choosing the DIY design option might seem fiscally responsible in the short term, but in the long term, it often leads to wasting time and money on redesigns and updates. You can spend hours trying to create marketing materials that don’t look good, regardless of how much you try. The graphic design learning curve is steep, and that time is better spent working on your actual business.
DIY design applications often tout the availability of thousands of templates to save you time, money, and stress. More often than not, a few of those templates stand out above the rest, to you and everyone else. You may find that what you thought was an elevated, unique design is disturbingly similar to a competitor’s, making it difficult for customers to distinguish between them. A professional graphic designer creates original designs tailored to your business and product.
Another challenge for amateur designers can be translating their designs across mediums. You may perfect a design for a digital presentation, but when you attempt to repurpose that design in a print version the result is a distorted, mismatched mess. Now you need help to fix what you’ve done because the image size and resolution specifications for digital graphics are significantly different from what is used for printed materials. You may eventually spend more than you would have if you invested in quality design in the first place.
Looking for business success? Choose a professional graphic designer!
Hiring a professional graphic designer isn’t just about pretty marketing materials. It’s about how your products and services are initially perceived by potential clients, creating connections, growing your business, and achieving your goals. A skilled graphic designer helps you get there using their know-how and strategic expertise, helping you avoid financial loss and bad public relations. A DIY design solution brings nothing to the table except frustration and wasted time. To learn how our professional graphic designers can help you create the marketing materials you need to succeed, talk with one of our marketing experts today!