I voted this up because I'd like to see a discussion, not because I necessarily agree with the article. Certainly, I agree that the bar is high for graphic mat

I voted this up because I'd like to see a discussion, not because I necessarily agree with the article. Certainly, I agree that the bar is high for graphic materials nowadays. However, I think it is often better to hire a professional to do this work. It's very easy to burn a lot of time on graphic design as a leader or developer only to produce designs which, at best, are 'rather good' not 'really good'. Past experience: launched a website without a designer because we had a developer with some design skills. Result: we paid a great developer (at the cost of a great developer) to do average design work. Next time I hired a dedicated designer - the results were an order of magnitude better, we got it done at a lower cost and that great developer got to get on with writing great code.