DIY vs. AI vs. Professional
Designers are always saying that a professional will deliver better results than you can achieve on your own or with AI. But is the difference really that significant? Lots of authors create their own designs, and it looks just fine. Plus, it’s way cheaper and faster than hiring a pro.
To understand why professional design is so important, you have to consider its purpose. Graphic design doesn’t exist just to create an interesting image. As important as aesthetics are, they fall flat when they’re not supported by the groundwork of design principles and the structure of strategy. For example, a book cover may look visually appealing, but if it’s not communicating in a way that its ideal reader will relate to, it’s probably going to fail.
Designers learn to artfully weave the form and function of each book to create something that will work in the time, place, and market for which it was intended. They know how to make a cover call out from the shelf to a tired mom while fading out like white noise in front of her teen daughter. Each image, font, color, and composition is chosen with the target reader in mind.
This is an area in which artificial intelligence and do-it-yourself programs like Canva can fall short.
Canva provides endless beautiful templates, allowing you to discover a design that makes your cover fit the vibe of your book. However, templates lack individuality and purpose. If you thought you found the perfect cover design on Canva, there’s a chance that someone else used that same design for their book. A template by definition is meant to be used multiple times, creating duplicates of the same product without regard to the actual content or end user.
AI comes with its own set of issues. Because it is meant to sample and reproduce content that’s already been created by real artists and designers, work created by AI lacks creativity and originality. Besides that, many people have objections to the moral, environmental, and ethical impacts of AI. When it is clear that AI has been used in a design, many people reject the product because it signals that the creator does not value quality. You may be able to feed your strategy into artificial intelligence, but you will lose credibility with your readers if they disapprove of AI use in creative fields.
Every author must weigh the pros and cons of each method of design. Good design is an investment, but bad design will cost you much more in the long run.