Originally Posted by Tofu

Hell no. No offense to any designers, but those who strictly stick to design and don't pay attention to what everyone else is doing, do not have a clue. Yeah, they make some pretty beautiful banners, but if you look around you'll notice that beautiful banners are not what's generating high CTR.

Even when working for a major company, my ugly photoshop banners with good sales text and effective call-to-action always murdered the CTR of the ones created by the design team.