This is Why Not Everybody Should Design

Reading Joseph Kalinowski’s article in Content Marketing Institute

”True love, in the sense of what designers bring to their visual creation in the form of creativity, hierarchy, design rules, and attention to detail that gives their design a bigger impact over others clogging the audience’s news feeds.”

reminds me of an idea I kept thinking about: not everybody should design.

It’s like this.

Let’s say my car is broken and it has some serious issues with the engine.

I’m not a car specialist and I don’t know how to fix it. I also don’t know what the problem is and I don’t want to go to a mechanic.

So I buy a book and I take the time to learn about the car, then I look at several tutorials about how others are repair their cars, I talk to specialists about my problem and then I go under my car and try to fix it. I get my hands dirty and lose so much time on understanding what happens with all those cables and other little pieces. After I understand them, I think I see the problem and I try to fix it.

Now I’m getting into my car and try to start the engine. It’s working! So now I think that I’ve solved the problem. I’m happy that I didn’t have to go to the mechanic. Even if I lost a lot of time on educating myself about cars, looking at tutorials and talking to specialists.

Now I’m driving my car and guess what, bing bong bang booom… my car just stopped again and I don’t know what’s wrong. So I get nervous and go to a mechanic. Now this mechanic looks at the car and says “Well my friend… you have an old problem here and a new problem here. Why didn’t you come when you experienced the first one?”

If I had gone to the mechanic first, then he surely would have solved the old problem faster with some money invested, but with some more time gained.

So when something’s wrong with my car, I go to the professional, to the car mechanic.

Now let’s get back to our topic over here, if you have a design situation, why don’t you go to a specialist, as in designer?

Let’s say you want to design an infographic and you find some apps which create templates you can easily use with  drag and drop. You design the infographic, drag and drop, insert the datas and some cliparts and voila. Now you insert the content into a blog post and share it on your social media networks and you are waiting for the big shares. Guess what? Nothing. Why? Because the infographic is ugly. It’s not so visually appealing and nobody likes it. Because your infographic was a template where you edit a text and some colors. Now you are saying that infographics suck and don’t behave as well as you’d read in some blog post.

But what if you would invest some money and start working with professional designers?

Why? Because the designers understand the power of visuals, the power of good looking visuals and some of them have the experience of creating values through their work.

This is why I also don’t agree with the idea that a social media manager should create visuals for his Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest network.

Why? Because if you work for a brand (or for your personal brand) and you want to gain something by using social media – making your community to buy your product/service, you should create valuable content. And how can you return your investment if you don’t invest in your work? A social media manager doesn’t have to create visuals, the designer should create the visuals. A social media manager should speak with the community, create strategies and work together with the designer.

Like Joe Pulizzi said

[Tweet “I see the social media manager as the “manager” not the creator of content via @JoePulizzi”]

Creating templates with free design apps which everybody can use does nothing but underestimate the designers’ importance.

Going from this to a logo/brand free app builder is just a step away and we will be having in the future brands created by amateurs who don’t want to invest money in their company, so the professional ones will disappear.

Don’t get me wrong, if you love design but you are just an amateur, you can design for yourself. But when we talk about brands and companies that need to create valuable content out there… well, my friend, here is the place where the professional should do his job.

Think about this: how would it be if a truck driver could do your social media manager work with a free app where he could just drag and drop? How would you feel about it? Maybe frustrated or angry.

Now think about designers in this situation and just start to work together.

This is why I strongly recommend to anybody who is a content marketer or a social media manager and wants to create visual content – work with designers and let them do their job!

Let the professional ones do their jobs with their tools.