Why hire a professional graphic designer?
Q: Why hire a professional graphic designer?
A: To attract new customers and clients and to save time, money and avoid headaches!
A good designer can help you to develop a professional look. S/he can help guide you through the process of developing your ideas by offering professional, objective insight into what can help or hurt your brand. She brings experience and creativity to the table, offering new ideas and ways to achieve your goals more economically. She abides by your branding guidelines so that you can maintain a consistent look across all your marketing materials. If you don’t have branding guidelines, a professional designer can help you develop them.
Experienced graphic designers have a wide variety of skills and abilities including knowledge of art and design, branding and marketing. They should have good communication and research skills, intuition, creativity, as well as technical expertise in illustration, photo editing and page layout, typography, color theory, print technology, and web design. They should own up-to-date software and hardware, as well as a collection of fonts and the ability to find and purchase appropriate stock images at a reasonable price. Without the appropriate expertise you risk getting to the end of the design process and finding that the design doesn’t work, or it looks just like someone else’s, or it simply cannot be printed or posted in its current format. You may have to do a “fix,” or a “workaround” or even start over.
A good designer goes to great lengths to maintain their reputation. This works in your favor in that the designer will produce her best work possible by communicating, getting things done right the first time, on time and making sure you are happy with the finished product. It is in her best interest to make you look good! She relies on you and her other clients for referrals, which are her best sources of new business.
It’s nice to develop a long-term trusting relationship with a designer. If you need additional design services sometime in the future, you can return to the same designer who will understand you and your business and have all of your files, fonts and guidelines at hand, saving you time and money. Otherwise you can wind up “recreating the wheel” every time you start a new project, which can be very expensive in the long run.
It may be tempting to utilize outsourcing, “crowdsourcing” or “design contests” online because they appear to be a bargain. These sites are peopled with the good, the bad and the ugly, just like the rest of the Internet. There may be some decent designers out there, but many are novices, or people who use the same designs over and over again, or even people who “lift” others’ designs with no regard to copyright. When dealing with designers overseas (or even out of state) you may have difficulty getting legal recourse if the work is not original and the legitimate owner wants to sue you for copyright infringement. Your Ukrainian designer who works for $10 an hour by this time will likely have disappeared into cyberspace. Most good designers will not participate in these kinds of schemes. They don’t need to.