Graphic Design School Blog

Knowing how to price jobs and what to charge clients is as essential a component of being a successful fledging graphic designer as any. It’s a delicate thing to get right. Price a job too high and you risk your prospective client remaining just that—prospective. Too low, and the person on the other end might view this as a reflection of the quality of the services you provide in a “you get what you pay for” sort of way. So there’s a balance to be struck, and it pays to have some systems in place. Here in the second lesson of our series on professional design practice I’ll do my best to provide you with some frameworks below. So, without further ado, let’s dive in!

Author: Bradley Hotson for The Graphic Design School The Graphic Design School offers vocational training graphic design courses. Delivery is online, affordable and open to students all over the world to study in the comfort of their own home.

Professional Design Practice Lesson 2: Freelance Fee Structures and How to Quote

Let’s begin with the simple part which, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to have in place: Your working rates, both hourly and daily. All freelance designers need to establish their rates, have a good idea of them and be ready to submit them when asked for. We’ll get onto pricing entire jobs below but for now we’ll tackle rates, which you’ll need to have in place before you can quote for jobs anyway.

Your rates are what you charge clients for your time and services. Hourly and daily are the most common, both used and asked after. Some individuals choose to charge their clients by the half hour but in general and for the purposes of this blog I’ll stick to the two rates mentioned above.

When deciding what and how you are going to charge people, there are several factors to consider.

How experienced am I

“The force is with you, young Skywalker. But you are not a Jedi yet.” Image courtesy of Daniel Drisdelle

A fledging junior will charge differently from a middleweight designer, who will charge differently from a freelance creative director. This all comes down to experience. You’ll get better the more experienced a designer you become, and will have to adjust your fees throughout your career to reflect this.

Assuming for now you’re at a junior level, you’ll need to choose rates which aren’t quite as high as those charged by middleweights, but good enough for someone who cares about what they do and considers him or herself a fledging professional. In Great Britain, between £12–15 per hour and £80–100 per day are reasonable rates for a junior graphic designer. Each country will have its own averages. Do your research and place yourself where you feel you belong within the appropriate range of rates.

What’s in my Armoury

Any special arrows in there? Image courtesy of Yo Spiff

If you happen to count certain specialised skills within your quiver of arrows then you may want to think about a range of rates for the different services you offer. In addition to solid typography and layout skills and a decent knowledge of printing processes, (which should all be mandatory), perhaps you’re also a bit of a Flash wizard, Aftereffects Jedi or Processing ninja. Competences in these areas, because so baffling to the majority of people, tend to mean that clients will pay a higher fee for them. Given this, to keep a set of rates for standard graphic design services and another for more specialised abilities is a good idea.

Variable Rates

The Lada, the Mondeo or the Bently sir? Image courtesy of Kristina / Webbelina

There are large and small businesses, rich and poor, and everything in between. A good client list should consist of both small businesses and organisations, where shortfalls in budgets are compensated for by a hefty dose of creative freedom afforded the designer, and larger, more established clients, where typically the work is more corporate in look and feel and designers will have more to rail against, but who usually have more money to spend than their smaller high street brethren.

Bearing this in mind, whilst stopping short of advocating rampant, opportunistic greed I see nothing wrong with keeping your working rates supple to allow for the different types of businesses/organisations who might approach you and ask you to quote for a job. It would seem instinctively wrong to quote a local charity the same fee as you would a blue-chip high street bank for the same job. Given this, it is good to keep a range of fees at your disposal, with a top and a bottom end, to allow for the different types of businesses who may engage your services.

Pricing Jobs. Here’s where the Fun Begins…

With a clear and considered decision made on what rates you are going to charge people, you will be able to quote for jobs with a degree of precision. The same rules regarding striking a balance apply here, and the rates you will have established should form your first consideration when quoting for jobs.

There are several factors to reflect on here, some, most or all of which you should build in to quotes you submit wherever appropriate. The more factors you examine and deem relevant to each particular job the more you’ll protect yourself against unforseen eventualities and maximise your profits. It’s also worth noting here to get as much information about the impending job as possible from the client before returning with an estimate. The more information you have at your disposal the better your judgement will be, and the more accurate your quote.

How Long is this Job Likely to Take?

One of the most basic questions you’ll need to consider and estimate on is how much time the job is going to take up. To give this your best estimate, you’ll need to think about how quickly you can complete the actual task, minus client meetings, traveling times, back-and-forth decisions etc. Start to think about how fast you work, how easily the creative process comes to you and how proficient you are with the software packages you use.

What is my Client Like, and How Much Attention is He Going to Require?

The designer/client relationship is an intriguing process of discovery. Image supplied by Simon Goode

A good client can make all the difference to your mental wellbeing as a graphic designer. They’re people, and people are all different, so all clients will possess varying degrees of certain strengths in areas such as organisation, communication and deferment to your professional judgement. Rarely will a client exhibit strengths in these three broad areas in equal measure. Most will be more adept at one over the others.

All designer-client relationships involve a certain amount of mutual learning and a building up of rapport, which, incidentally, is one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. Before submitting any quotes, you will need to get as good a feel as you can for how much of your time and attention you think your client will need. Having only one or two initial meetings, some emails and telephone calls to go on, it helps to stay tuned in to the microclimate of the budding relationship in its early stages, to best anticipate, then build in, what kind of client he or she is going to be.

“We could do it like that or…”

Visually arresting Dragon poster by Australian designer and The Graphic Design School graduate Reide Iredale

Another thing to consider and worth discussing here is the question of design options. To explain, you might be asked to quote on the design and printing of a corporate brochure and see an opportunity within the brief to do something outstanding.

As well as supplying a quote for a standard design job, you might also offer your client a range of delicious design and printing options, gently informing them that, whist perfectly acceptable to pursue the 4-colour, purely typographical “route A”, isn’t the target audience much more likely to be wowed if we pursue “route B” and spend a little more money on commissioning that designer who did the incredible dragon illustration for our intro pages?

All in the Research

Take a leaf from the scouts’ book and “Be Prepared” when pricing jobs. Image used with permission of Steve Borgerding

How much research will need to be done on this job? A local estate agent in need of a logotype and stationery, who comes to you with a rush of A4 printouts of rivals’ work and instructs you to “make it like these” should require less research than a Qatari newspaper contracting you to translate the Gotham typeface into Arabic script, retaining the characteristics of the roman whist simultaneously adapting the face to suit the cultural sensibilities of its readers. Try to estimate how much research will be involved in each job and build this in to your pricing.

Client Involvement & Collaboration

Luckily, Harmony Medical was a client local to Hotson Studio and traveling costs were kept to a minimum.

This ties in to the ‘what is my client like?’ topic discussed above. Try to establish how many meetings will be necessary throughout the design process. Will these meetings involve traveling costs for you in train fares or petrol? Perhaps you’ll bag a Spanish client who’ll insist you fly out for a meeting with him in Madrid (it happens). Does your client have a computer with design software in his office and would he prefer you to work from there alongside him?

Even if the client agrees to visit you at home home or the studio, client meetings can eat away at time like nothing else. If traveling is required of you, the costs involved can hit the pocket hard.

Anything You can’t Handle Alone?

Some jobs will almost certainly involve you subcontracting parts of them out to professionals from the affiliated trades. Illustration, photography, copywriting, translation and motion graphics are typically, and frequently, subcontracted out to others. In this scenario, before submitting a quote to your client you will need to gather your own and work it/them into yours. When doing this, as a rule a 10–15% markup on subcontracted costs is viewed by the profession as acceptable.

Printing commission

Some printers, usually after the development of an ongoing relationship, allow their customers to build in some commission to the quotes they generate. Here, after supplying your printer with a job specification and requesting a quote, then receiving one back, you would ask the printer to re-quote building in an extra cost of between 5–10%. This would be your commission. You would supply your client with the amended printer’s quote and on being paid their fees the printer would pass on your commission to you.

Creative Generosity

On a case-by-case basis, you might decide to offer a discount of between 10–15% for the first job undertaken for a new client, as a gesture of goodwill and in the hope that your generosity at this stage might incentivise him to keep feeding you work in the future. Make a judgement on how likely you feel it is that the relationship will be long-term, generating prospects of further design work for you.

If you can get away with it…

Lastly, and if you feel you can get away with it, add a little extra in to cover yourself, because even with the best planning and pricing in the world, you can never predict for certain what is going to happen to timeframes and budgets. One ex-client of mine springs to mind who, throughout initial meetings, was the very embodiment of good organisation and courtesy, yet who, once the job was underway, revealed itself to be exasperatingly disorganised and at times discourteous. I wasted a lot of hours as a result of their disorganisation, but the job had already been quoted, agreed on and fixed. Their having a limited budget for my services made it difficult for me to add in additional costs retrospectively.

In Sum…

Whilst seemingly a lot to take in, by studying the factors outlined above and bringing to bear as many as you feel relevant to each job you are asked to price, you’ll find yourself more in pocket and more prepared for unexpected hiccups than you would if you simply went through the motions. Fixing your hourly and daily rates is a good and necessary first step. From there, question every part of each potential job you can think of to assess what it’s going to cost you, in time and money, and work out your best estimate. Quoting is sometimes seen as a mildly dull aspect of the freelance graphic designer’s lot, but by viewing yourself less like a sales clerk in a partitioned deskspace and more like a tactical commander on the battlefield, you’ll be well prepared and less likely to fall behind with bills. One final piece of advice from copywriter and blogger Holly Knowlman, who herself is passing on advice that she had heard: “If it’s a crap job and you hate the client … quote them a fortune. It’s much better than turning them down.”

Cool and unflappable, because she has all the bases covered in her estimates. Image used with permission of Laura Vancane