Great question. Perhaps you are a website builder, and you make cracker-jack websites, all of your code runs the first time, and you are wondering why a designer is really necessary. Or maybe you are a small business owner, your business is on fire, but costs are high, profits margins are tight, and you know what you want your business card to look like, so why not just use one of those free templates online?
I understand.
And honestly, maybe you’re fine without a designer. Maybe you feel your product speaks just fine for itself. Or maybe the satisfaction of doing it yourself it worth it the slightly home-made look. Maybe you want the home-made look!
If you’re thinking you would like to hear the arguments of the defense, allow me to indulge you. Perhaps your product is so good that it actually deserves to be represented by a well designed package/label/social-media campaign. By the time you have fiddled with that template and figured out how to line up the thing with the other thing and gotten the colors right and checked for typos, maybe you could have saved your time and energy and invested that back into your business.
So, why a designer. Because there are things designers know. For example, design psychology. Do you know who your target audience is, and how to design your package/label/social-media campaign so that it speaks to that audience? This is something us designers can help you with. Another skill at our disposal is typeface pairing. It may seem a simple task, but when faced with the bewildering array of fonts and typefaces most people will end up making a choice based on familiarity or a sense of adventure. But does that make the choice an appropriate representation of what they are trying to convey? And which typefaces will pair well with the primary typeface?
These are just two examples of skills you will have access to when you decide to bring a graphic designer onto your team! There is way more to think about than just making things “pretty”.