The short version: If your time is worth £50 an hour, three hours wrestling with a Canva template costs you £150 in time you could have spent selling. A fixed £100 to have it done properly, in half the time, by someone who does this for a living, is the cheaper of the two.
The "I can do it myself" trap
Canva is good software, and it's put design within reach of people who would never have paid a designer. It's also created a trap for early-stage founders.
When you start out you have more time than money, so you design your own logo and flyers. Then the business grows and the habit doesn't go with it. You're still your own amateur graphic designer, tweaking fonts at 11 PM on a Tuesday.
The true cost of bad design
Beyond the lost hours, DIY design has a second cost: lost trust.
People judge a business on how it looks before they read a word of it. If you're selling a £2,000 service and your brochure is a generic Canva template with misaligned text, the customer notices the mismatch — and assumes the service is as sloppy as the brochure.
The limits of online templates
Canva is built for the screen, not for the printing press. Professional design requires technical knowledge that templates cannot provide:
- Print: Understanding how RGB colours on a screen will look muddy when converted to CMYK ink on paper.
- Typography: Knowing how to adjust kerning and leading so a paragraph is actually legible.
- Brand consistency: Ensuring your brand looks identical across a van wrap, a website, and a business card. DIYers often end up with a Frankenstein brand that looks different on every platform.
Delegate without the risk
Founders avoid hiring a designer because they're picturing an open-ended hourly bill or a monthly retainer. Neither applies here.
I do one-off graphic design for UK founders at fixed prices. You hand the job over, you know what it costs before I start, and you get back to running the business.