There are dozens of products out there purporting to make it easy for anyone to design like a pro.

There are graphic design tools like Canva and Adobe Express. Then you’ve got your drag-and-drop website builders like Squarespace and Wix. We round out our tour with video editing applications like iMovie. They all make design work seem so accessible and simple.

Don’t be fooled.

Great design is about more than the mechanics of placing images on a screen in a certain order. Design professionals spend years learning the tools and techniques of the trade. They understand things like color theory, typography, scale, perspective, and technical elements–the list goes on.

Templated, drag-and-drop tools let you skip the hard stuff–the years of learning–and dive right into the creation. But jumping the line comes at a price.

Here’s why it is always, always worth it to hire a professional designer.

Aesthetics matter

People judge books by their covers. (Literally. More than half of readers admitted to it in a survey.) Your logo, your website, and any other visual representation of your brand tell people a lot about you in a very short amount of time. You want an image that will convey a powerful, appropriate message.

If your visuals are sub-par–an unappealing color palette, comic sans font everywhere, cheesy stock images–it doesn’t make for a solid first impression. If you’re willing to cut corners on your brand’s visuals, a prospect might ask, what else are you half-assing?

Beyond the risk of designing something ugly, there’s also the potential of creating a visual that doesn’t say what you think it’s saying.

Scrolling through the Bad Design Subreddit will give you dozens of examples. The mistakes range from the confusing to the illegible to the (comically) offensive to the unintelligible.

Someone thought they were being clever when they designed these things, but in reality, they were being unclear. It’s easy for a layperson to make a misstep that would never trip up a design professional.

Templated, drag-and-drop tools let you skip the hard stuff–the years of learning–and dive right into the creation. But jumping the line comes at a price.

Then there’s the technical stuff

Design is about more than aesthetics these days. There’s a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes in digital design.

Embedding a bulky animation file on your website can slow down your site’s load times, which harms your site’s health. Emails designed without proper testing might not function in specific email clients, meaning some readers won’t be able to see your message.

In the world of website design, the ease that comes with drag-and-drop tools means you’re sacrificing digital health. Pre-made templates are designed to account for all of your potential needs. But that also means the template includes code to support any of those features you might choose to use–regardless of whether you use them.

Bulky, extra code can drag down load times on your website. (Go to a site that’s been designed using a drag-and-drop template, run a quick Google Lighthouse analysis, and peep the slow time to paint.)

A custom-made, properly-designed site gives you the right aesthetics for visitors and the proper coding for quick load times and good site health.

Cut corners come back to bite you

It’s super tempting to go the free or cheap route if you’re just starting out, don’t know what you want, or are simply overwhelmed by choice. “We can just do something cheap now and upgrade when we’re ready.”

Not so. Your logo, color palette, and typography are foundational elements of your brand identity. Once they’re out there, they’re near-impossible to fully walk back.

When it comes to website design, you create an uphill battle for yourself when you employ a fast, easy template. Not only do you put your business at a disadvantage by potentially harming site health and SEO standing, but you also entrench yourself in poor design. It’s easier to update a good website down the road than it is to scrap and replace a bad website with a new one. Give yourself a solid foundation on which to build.

Farewell to drag and drop forever?

Just because accessible design tools shouldn’t be your go-to for everything doesn’t mean they are verboten.

In the fast-paced digital marketing world, you might need dozens of new images each week to feed the social media beast. Creating one-off pictures for your Facebook feed? That’s the perfect task for a tool like Canva!

Why? Because you’re making those images in Canva with a template (designed by a pro) and based on your brand guidelines (also set by a pro). With guardrails in place, it’s easier for a regular Jane like you or me to create a shareable image on Canva. But without those rules? Chaos.

So keep your drag-and-drop tools in mind for simple, contained, low-stakes tasks. But when undertaking a design project that’s foundational to your brand or business, it’s time to call in the professionals.

Ready to partner with a design pro to tackle your website, logo, or ad campaign? We’re here to talk.