Why pay a designer when I can do it myself?

It looks easy enough. A brochure or flyer can be whipped up in 5 minutes (okay, 30 minutes) in Word or Photoshop, right? Your niece/neighbor/brother-in-law is a whiz on a computer. Between the two of you, you can whip something up, right? Besides, it looks like fun.

Let's assume you're capable of selecting a couple of colors, fonts and you've found some appropriate photos/art. Great. Now try putting them together.

Not quite what you were after? Try using a wizard or template.

Still have a nagging suspicion that it's, well... a bit ordinary? Something's missing, but you can't put your finger on what it is. The photos are great, the font is cool, the color is your favorite... Why is this so damn hard? In a word: composition.

Composition is the secret ingredient that separates professional design from home-made efforts.

Design is just a fancy word for composition. Designers are simply composers of visual elements. Whether they are fashion designers, interior designers or graphic designers, they are trained to select scale, color, shape, line, texture, materials and a myriad of other choices to create arrangements that look coherent and have that wow factor.

Composition is the art of taking raw ingredients (text, photos, a logo) and organizing them into an interesting, pleasing, coherent arrangement. This involves decisions such as how large each element should be, what colors to use where, what shapes to introduce. It involves creating a sense of hierarchy on the page so that the viewer is not paralyzed by too many choices. Most of all, it requires editing the thousands of possibilities, and then modifying them as needed to produce an original appealing look. The result is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To the untrained eye, it's often easier to spot a design that lacks composition than one that has it. Just open the Yellow Pages and scan the ads. Ever noticed how easily you're seduced by ads that look simple, elegant and organized, versus ones that just scream 20 messages at you? A presentation without composition is like an orchestra with no conductor.

What else can a designer offer that I can't do myself?

Skill and speed. As with any endeavor, the longer you do it, the faster and better you get at it. Someone who works with visual software every day is going to be faster and more skilled than someone who dabbles or is still mastering it.

Longevity: Being immersed in the design world, they are more likely to know when a trend has reached saturation point, and steer you in the direction of emerging trends for a look that is current and that will last longer.

Raw materials: Designers have access to hundreds of fonts. They also know how to tweak them to give your logo/piece a custom look. (When you use a font that's available with standard software like Word, the results look ordinary. Why? Because your eyes, and everyone else's, are conditioned to recognize them.) They know where and how to acquire original professional photography or illustration that fits your budget so that you don't end up using mediocre clip art or stock that looks –surprise!– bland and ordinary and, well, home-made.

You already know, from your own experience as a client and a consumer, that a first impression can be the last. Why cripple your efforts with anything less than a fabulous presentation?