Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.
The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.
If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement
That actually made me laugh because 90% of the people we see think that is design.
The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.