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When to DIY and when to hire professional expertise in graphic design

When to go down the Do-it-Yourself route, and when to hire professional design expertise? What are the Pros?

Lares VA Design

Last Update 3 months ago

When to go down the Do-it-Yourself route, and when to hire professional design expertise? What are the Pros?

To illustrate through an example from a similar creative field - In the early days of movie making, the equipment was heavy to handle, required training to operate and was expensive to produce.Video shoots today, though professional movie makers rely on top of the line technology, the humble mobile phone also has the capability to produce good videos for say, social media content. So now we have the affordable technology to DIY in movie making.

Similar technological advancement in the design and printing sector have got us from bulky equipment and professional apprenticeship to online design software such as Canva. This rapid advancement has happened in less than 3 decades. When I started out in the design field, where a major output was print media, I had to arrange the technical drafts by hand and mark the colour combination percentages manually. These percentages were the Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black combination. The CMYK colour process in printing is the technology through which multicolour prints are produced. Every colour in a picture can be reproduced using a combination of these four basic colour inks.

Now, what you see on your screen now is also an image but the colour combination for display on digital screens from mobile phones to cinema theatres is called the RGB or Red Green Blue format. So the millions of colours that you see on a screen are the combination of Red, green and blue points of light in various intensities. This is the reason why when we print RGB images on paper (without enhancing them or adapting to CMYK and adjusting the resolution), they appear a little different / dull in print. Something does gets lost in translation!

Why did I bore you with these details? It ties up with the topic of the day. 4 colour process technology is used while printing leaflets, posters, flyers and brochures in large quantities. While Social media content like instagram and Linkedin posts, videos, presentations and e-brochures use RGB scheme for display.

With multiple photo editing apps available for mobile phones and design programs like Canva, with built in templates and stock footage, it is a breeze to create posters and banners for social media, virtual backgrounds, PPT presentations and Emailers for DIY projects. What are the Pros?

Saves a lot of time
Hence makes it Affordable
Quick editing and updates are possible

SO, WHEN TO DIY?1. When you have spare time to experiment, gather the pictures and compose the text2. Only you can do it - Influencers of course, produce their own content 3. The print run - where print ready PDF files are accepted by the printer

Now- just recently, while working on an exhibition backdrop banner for a client, I found that there is size restriction in Canva. So though I was able to use the platform for designing the vertical standees on the left and right, I had to use Corel Draw (professional design software) for the centre 8 ft x 10 ft backdrop.

You need professional expertise for

1. Large prints

2. When Technical Specifications are important - for example while producing books for print and even cover designs 3. When your printer requires final print files in an Adobe Illustrator format.

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