As an independent designer, you have all the right to determine your own rates from your clients for graphic design projects. When you charge a fee from your client, you should base that rate on some factors. This post will talk about those factors.
- Measure Your Skill-Set: Your client does not only pay you for the materials you use for his graphic design, brochure design or corporate identity design work. He also pays you for your skills. Measure your skill-set and compare it with the kind of work you have been approached to do.
- Ask for A Price that Your Skills are Worth: Do not get carried away when you are measuring your skills in a quantitative method. Everybody thinks they are underpaid and their work deserves more. My point is: have a realistic mindset. If you are an expert graphic designer who has been in the industry for years, you know what you are worth but if you are a newbie, you cannot charge a hefty amount.
- Think about Your Lifestyle: Always take your lifestyle into account when finalizing your rate. You have to consider your cost of living.
- Think about the Paychecks that Other Graphic Designers Draw: Talk to your graphic designer friends and find out how much they are getting for different kinds of corporate identity design or brochure design projects. Take those amounts into consideration when you calculate your fee.
- Calculate A Sound Profit: Before fixing your rates, you must compute your profit margin. Graphic designing is your business, this is what you do for a living. Your profit is the amount that you will save, so you have to earn profits.
- Do Not Forget Your Business Expenses: You must have a set up at your office, even if yours is a small business. There must be a rent for the office space, the electricity bills, the computer hardware and software expenses and most importantly, taxes.
- Calculate the Time and Pressure Associated With the Work: Calculate your billable hours, which means the hours during which you will work on the project. First calculate these hours for a week, then for 52 weeks – the number of weeks in a year. This would give you your annual billable hours.
- What Do You Want To Charge? An Hour-Based Rate or a Flat Rate? This is something you have to decide yourself. Not every professional works the same way. Some are comfortable with hour-based fees while others think a flat rate is more convenient. In my opinion, flat rate is better because it assures you a fixed income.
Conclusion
So by now, you must already have a good idea about how you can fix your remuneration for the graphic design projects that you are approached for. Communicate with your client regularly and let them know about any problems that you may have.
Hope my little information has been helpful to you!
A useful post! A designer should charge according to the difficulty level of the project. The hourly rate clause should be included in the agreement if additional services are provided such as unlimited revisions, adding new pages to a website or inclusion of an animated presentation. However, one should not charge too high as that might make the client look for other designers. The best way is asking clients about their budget or what rates they can pay. If the project is too critical, a designer can explain the designing process to the customer. This will help a customer understand the criticality of the project and pay accordingly.