This is the actual answer. Charging hourly punishes you for being efficient and more experienced. It also completely ignores the concept of rush fees when there’s a higher than average demand on your time.
The ideal should be to calculate what you’re fee per hour is based your living expenses/desired annual revenue and then from there estimate how long a project should be, times that by your hourly cost, add about 20% for taxes etc and then charge someone a deposit for project initiation.
I think it depends on the kind of work you do. You can certainly have contracts for the typical design work e.g. branding but i have had quite a few corporate clients where the work didn’t fit into the ‘heres a text doc, design this up as a…’ and is very iterative. Charging hourly made much more sense, i even just started charging one client $4000 a month for the work.
If the scope is defined, fixed price doesn’t mean they can just keep asking for revisions forever - but managing scope is absolutely critical if doing fixed price work versus hourly.
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Imo you’re absolutely correct, and this is a common way to be making money as a contractor. If you can get paid $5,000 for a project, and get it done a week less than the competition, its not like the customer is unhappy that you got it done faster and you walk away with a higher labor rate.
This takes some calculation on what to charge but it’s a far better way to freelance.
Production graphic designers literally have infinite work, being paid hourly is the only viable option (or salary, but with the overtime we get it's a hard pass).
That said, our pay is hardly competitive since there's no real competition in my area.
Damn, maybe I should go independent. I work for a large promotional apparel company and we're stuck with the rates they set and the quotas we need to meet.
Any advice on figuring out billing per project? I feel like you can shoot yourself in the foot with this too if the initial quote is too low and then the project takes longer than expected. How do you go about dealing with this?
I use a project rate with a specified number of edits/rounds. If they go over a certain number/hours, they get billed an additional fee (usually high and by the hour at that point). It covers your butt on labor as well as making the client more specific and careful about edit requests.
Hourly rates are great for people who dig ditches.
Use a sliding scale...If you are developing a logo/identity system for a local coffee shop and you like the folks and they'll throw in free coffee, charge them $1,200 for example.
If a large business comes to you, same deliverable is $75k.
Yep, charge the value of the project, not the value of your time. If the value of the project doesn't at least cover the value of your time then don't take it.
Agreed!
I've found designers to be their own worst enemies.
Don't charge hourly rates!
Your education, skills, experience and value you bring to the table are what a client pays for not how much time it takes you to do something.
Don't commoditize yourself.
I'm rather confused how people charge hourly. Do they say "this costs 20 hours"? What happens if they spend more time? Or do they spend an undetermined number of hours on a project, which the client has to pay for despite not knowing?
I think this underestimates the number of good clients that just need a handyman approach to their design work. They don’t want creative briefs. They don’t want mood boards. They don’t want a whole process. They just want it done. And in that case, you just charge more per hour if you’re efficient. Or you have a minimum charge for work. For me even if a change takes five minutes if I have to make a change it’s at least a half hour billed.
I work with a lot of schools and nonprofits. They are great clients. And I could never imagine trying to do each of the projects they toss at me on a project basis rather than just charging them for the hours I’m working.
The only exception for me at least is very large projects like magazine layout, for which I will quote an upfront price .
No, you just adjust the hourly to your rate overall. I think figuring out how many hours a task takes me is the best way to budget for a job.
The reason this works is that if your client wants more hours, you charge them more. So if you give a range for a homepage design, for example, you add in "this cannot exceed 60 hours" or something like that. It's all about managing the expectations of your client.
I also don't want to overcharge my clients. I want to give them a good value, otherwise they won't come back or recommend me to others.
Not if you clearly discuss scope of work before going into a project. And when it does go over you immediately contact your client before you do anything. Communication is key, and most designers don't know how to talk to their clients and be proactive
we know how to talk to clients. but clients are unreasonable assholes sometimes. You make it clear that you will charge after so many revisions then they fight you on it or withhold payment cause they didn’t get their way
Because they've been "in the industry for 20 years" so they can't be wrong.
Charging by project is objectively superior. There is still a place for hourly rates but it shouldn't be the default.
It's funny when people pull that card as their only defense. The reality is that you can easily do something wrong for 10, 20, 50 years if you are never challenged on it.
That's more about client management. Two rounds of amends included in the quote, any subsequent rounds incur additional charges, iron clad brief and scope of work, including agreed timelines. Not saying that clients won't try and push boundaries etc, but it's incumbent on yourself to manage the situation.
Uh yeah, good luck getting overseas workers willing to work for pennies on the dollar to agree on that, as well as the brain dead CEOs willing to dumpster dive in the Fiverr talent cesspool for those prices. Best to just ignore it altogether and work for people who value your time and work.
Yeah, OP sets price at 50$ and i put it at 45$ and get all the work. You now undercut me at 40$ to get all the clients and OP is now very overpriced. You and i need 40k yearly just to live but the guy on fiverr in india only needs 5000 yearly so he asks for 8$. Op is now priced outrageously.
Welcome to the free market
I’m not sure it’s so much to do with racism rather than the fact that it is were i [mostly hear about outsourcing](https://www.business-standard.com/amp/companies/news/amazon-s-just-walk-out-checkout-tech-was-powered-by-1-000-indian-workers-124040400463_1.html). My last company had outsourced their whole IT help desk (70.000 man company) to india.
Googleling cost of living [returns 1200$ per month for a family of 4](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=India#)
In reality i’m in europe so poland or rumania or estonia would be more relevant refference for me but i try to use international refferences online.
And this was a matter of a service like fiverr where tasks are uploaded to the internet so all are remote and thus any place with internet is relevant so i just needed a low cost of living area. Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Nigeria, Nepal, make your pick. Heck it could be a guy in a hut in wyoming (no one wants to live there right?) who just lives cheap for all i care
Except you could've just stopped at Fiverr. But you felt the need to mention India. Or any other country where the cost of living is low.
Well I'll give it a pass. If your clients are going to Fiverr for designers, then maybe you need to pitch to better clients. Not a single business that is serious about their design ever goes to fiverr. Not even in India.
Even if they do, it's not a problem of undercutting prices but typical corporations trying to squeeze out as much as possible by paying as low as they can. This is true for any country regardless. It's just that designers from these countries are easier to underpay not because of their lower living cost but because of the low opportunities for income most of the citizens have.
The problem is the diploma mills spitting out students year after year after year into a marketplace that is already saturated, and now, thanks to globalization and the internet, is competing with much lower COL countries than the US
The problem is nobody values design. You could say the same about hairdressers or lawyers, but people seem to view most other careers as 'you get what you pay for' in terms of quality and they don't with design.
And one of the main reasons nobody values the work is because there are so many who are willing to undercut the market rate just to get their foot in the door. I mean, I get it, I understand. People have got to eat. But it's proved to be a race to the bottom.
My referencing the diploma mills (I don't know if they still exist, but in the 90's they were everywhere (The Art Center, others) is referencing directly the complaints of professional designers who taught there. They taught, but they were NOT allowed to fail students, since the whole grift for the school was the federal matching funds for enrolled and graduating students.
Yes, computers in the 90s made design more accessible for the masses. But the grift was strong.
I'll never fault a customer for traveling the world via their laptop in order to find a price that fits their budget. And I'll never fault someone living on the other side of the world who can make their living by servicing clients at less than the rates required to make a living in the USA.
Computers and the internet changed the game. I benefited from being in front of the curve in the 90s by using those tools myself. It's just the nature of progress at this point.
I'd highly recommend to anyone that working on other people's projects has no sustainability for most. And the way forward is to find a way to work your own IP, or partner up for a partial share of IP ownership in a contracted, mutually beneficial relationship with an IP owner.
There WILL be a pendulum swing back to consumers/clients wanting bespoke creative solutions. It's a few years away yet, but once EVERYTHING starts feeling the same, it will happen.
At least I hope so.
I’ve never once charged hourly, I charge flat rates for projects. They get 2 rounds, beyond that they incur another flat rate per round. Charge by value and experience not hours.
I charge per project instead of per hour. I know some people will give me flak for that, but it allows me to pad and bake in a few hours while also moving away from detailing my hourly rate. If they move out of the scope of the project then I have the ability to charge a "priority rate" to make sure I still get my bag lol
You're right that there should be higher per hour rates, but think of them like opticals. Opticals want you to buy glasses yearly but the reality is most people stop by once every few years at best. Depending on the quality, they charge more or less for their frames and the experience. Some of us are better, some are worse, some can command a higher price and others are barely scraping by. There are too many variables. But I get the frustration nonetheless!
This. People love project based pricing because in their head it’s closer to buying a custom product than it is to hiring a person. Even people making $50/hr do not want to pay you the same or more as it bruises their ego and this causes them to devalue your work. Project based also allows you to put in any additional fees, like rush/express pricing.
Designers have to also begin to understand this is a business and there are psychological aspects of it just like any other business.
If you're living in an area where $25/hr isn't a livable wage you should be charging much more than $50/hr. But really you shouldn't be charging by the hour at all.
instead of trying to find a magical way to make everyone to charge the same, try to add more value to your work so you sell more in the price point that you aim to.
Even if I was charging per hour, there is now way to charge 50$ where I live and stay on business. You just don't think about the global scale of graphic design and the localization of each economy.
Even within the US there is a huge gap in cost of living and what the local clients can pay between the states, you can't dictate what to charge to anyone. [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-capita-income-by-state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-capita-income-by-state)
I don't charge hourly unless it's maintenance related. Flat fees for literally everything else. I'd lose my home if I charged hourly. Time is money and fast design isn't always terrible design.
I pay my graphic designer $55/hr on a 1099. He sets his schedule so long as the work gets done on time. We bill the client $85/hr. It's a win/win for both. He is not exclusive to me. He has several people that he contracts with, but I'm the highest paying (on purpose) and typically get preferential hours.
Pay per contract not per hour.
The other problem is that the reason people are hesitant about paying higher is that there are so many junk designers out there - this causes clients to distrust the process.
You know why I charge so low for my work? Because no one will give me a job or let me freelance at those rates and I need to pay my fucking bills. Not all of us have the luxury to charge high prices and this sub really doesn't seem to get that.
When a client asks for my hourly rate, I tell em good creatives are researching and thinking 24h a day. (At least that's my case)
Usually that keeps them quiet.
I would love that. My shop charges $15 an hour for design work. It's beyond frustrating knowing that for every hour I work on something my shop loses money. Sure we might make it up on the finished product, but if the customer walks, we lose money. If they customer orders a small amount we lose money. I never did this when I was a photographer, and no matter what I tell my boss he won't budge. We're a small town and he says if we charge too much customers will just go online. But we're so freaking busy, I think some customers should go online. My boss alone is 6 weeks out on work. Charging more and cutting some of them loose would be a boon to us.
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Bill by agreed contract amount with estimated hours included for tasks. Make it not to exceed, and bill as you go. If they don’t pay you stop working. Never deliver the final files until payed in full.
Billing by hour sucks. I never go less than $100/hr if that’s requested as a time and materials contract. I also make them put up a retainer to work against doing it this way.
I charge $35 hourly, but I freelance on the side for two regular clients to build up my creative portfolio. My day job is boring production design, and I'd never be able to grow a portfolio from my work at it due to an NDA. Both my clients are fairly new companies that can't afford $50 hr rates. They need a designer, and I need experience, so we found a happy middle ground. With how my relationship is with my clients, I would be wasting more time communicating the cost of every little project if I priced it per item. I do, however, price one-off projects this way.
If I started freelancing full time, I would certainly raise my wages. But I'm just not there yet on my journey.
Perhaps you can, and perhaps you also convince people to do the same. However, not everyone listened to you. The way you break it down is quite impressive. There are more designers who are also in the line, and you know the competition in the industry. Newbies and hustlers may go down for their experience and for the money as well.
I don't disagree but as other people have put it charge per project, but what I would add to this is don't just say it's $50 to $150 for a banner (for example), because it won't be the designers overseas killing you with cheap labor, it will be the hybrid marketing people who will offer more complete services that will leave you in the dust when you enter that proce range and offer less for more.
We can whine about the quality of the work all we want but the client isn't focused nor cares about the apex of good design, they just want to have something that works and to focus on their business and goals.
Hot take but just do tattoos then ? Because with the rise of AI y’all will be out of good jobs very soon. For me it’s just a hobby but if you have to live from it as a Boss I would pay Asians to do it cheaper and quicker or AI, so maybe go into tattoo design ?
You make an interesting comment from the perspective of a hobbyist, with a few common misconceptions on the job. The historically gate-kept professional design community is the main reason for these misconceptions, and even working junior designers are guilty of harbouring these misconceptions too, so they are not something to feel bad about, they're just inaccurate. We get a lot of users attempting to post artwork here and calling it graphic design, but it is not because that is not the role graphic designers are paid for. A graphic designer is more like a scribe than a painter a lot of the time.
To be fair, AI is artwork supply. It cannot do what graphic designers do and you are showing that you indeed do not understand the professional world of graphic design by saying so. The industry survived the proliferation of clipart in the 90s, AI is much the same (but better, handier, and I love a lot of the tools). A big reason for this is the sheer volume of design needed in the industrial world as the principles of its society change, knowledge advances, and all of the recording of these demand new design.
A lot of beginners start out making social media posts and design for the software space, but physical-space graphic design will stay where it is and none of my former employers have been effected - in fact some are still trying to hire me back. This is because a huge portion of the finance in graphic design goes to physical media or custom design, and the demand for that remains constant and parallel with the efficacy of the commercial economy. My domestic economy is outperforming the US' so we are not seeing the same employment difficulty in the sector.
Anything on-site - signage, exhibition graphics, events' physical media, menus, name badges, anything that has to be manufactured, like packaging and labels etc, none of that employment will be touched by AI. It doesn't see well enough. It doesn't know about accessibile text sizing or even spelling correctly for a certain context. The physical work of measuring, placing and testing cannot be done by AI. What AI does here is make mockups easier, for "skinning" an establishment with its designs or generating context images of packaging to study Shelf Impact.
Also education or information design cannot be done by AI. Laying out a medical device instruction sheet in 47 languages, in a consistently styled template, cannot be done by AI for example. It cannot make the English template look "the same" in Japanese, Arabic or Hebrew, languages which shift orientation of their sentences. Then setting it up with consideration for folding from an A3 page size down to fit in a 3cm x 10cm box cannot be done by AI.
There are so-called AI infographics makers and they are just templates first of all. Templates have been available for free for years and something like template selection for customisation to a brand's continuity is a massive time-sink already, so not going to affect us. Secondly their systems are easier to use than InDesign, but are as, or more, involved and typically online, so too fragile for volume design work. A lot of hobbyists and juniors think of graphic design as the magazine cover, when it is mostly laying out the magazine. I welcome automation in this space, but it will still need designer implementation. As it stands, I am faster than these tools, faster again using some tools like Illustrator's vector generation AI. The problem with that tool is where if I ask it for a wine bottle for White Claw, there is a good chance that their minor competitors have already implemented that graphic, which would be unacceptable to such a market leader. Designers have had these conversations with such customers, I know because I have, as have many colleagues in the field, including one who worked on White Claw and is part of the largest brand designing company in the world. They never seem to stop hiring either.
Lastly, the majority of the time I am hired as a designer, it is specifically because the templates, clipart, stock imagery and AI designs are all indistinct. Graphic design, by its very nature as a profession, is where people come for *custom* design work. AI is history based so it cannot ideate originality, which is what IBM wanted when I worked with them, or what HP wanted, or Lenovo, or Pfizer, P&G, it's what all the blue-chip design buyers want (usually for events or packaging).
What you're talking about is artwork supply. Saying AI (in its current state) will replace graphic designers is akin to saying "Photographers will replace graphic designers". AI will have a much greater effect on artwork supply, and yes, going into tattoos or murals will prove to have lasting work over anything in the software space or templates for that. I do feel for anyone who fancied themselves as a vector or digital illustrator, that employment space has shrank considerably. But it is not graphic design or UX/UI design (the web's current layout design is still centuries behind print layout for example, it is a design space still in its infancy, with new best practices born every day), a lot of that will be unaffected. Mostly what US citizens or UK citizens are complaining about here is due to economic turmoil, not to do with AI or anything specific to the design industry. This is not to say art departments won't shrink, they will, but just for artists, photo retouchers or illustrators, not graphic designers, and just in already-fragile businesses like the web, where it is notoriously difficult to make money.
As for outsourcing, I invite anyone to try it. I would say a good 40% of my medium-scale businesses tried it before coming to me. A lot of the time, they either want to be over-the-shoulder of the designer at some point, or need updates too frequently or indepth for online communication to suffice. Again, this is a design market for single issue, low-output design - the magazine cover. This is not where the finance is spent in the design industry. Salaried jobs with benefits go to designers working in volume-design environments or on-site/events graphics - so blue-chip branding, publications (especially those which are unsuitable to digital consumption, like medical device instructions or education where you have 100s to 1000s of pages designed), the legal field and reports generation, packaging, or with events, you often can't lock-down a schedule until a matter of days/hours prior - awards ceremonies are a good example of this. This "boring" work is what makes money in graphic design and is why in-house designer for finance companies or FinTech companies are some of the highest paid graphic design positions. You're mostly converting spreadsheets and filling the cells on styled tables, and when published, is a legal document so proofing often takes weeks. Boring but rigorous work.
And I know one magazine cover artist who works on all the big publications in print, he is still refusing extra work and is currently touring Asia on a work break.
I correct the middle part for you : they can’t do some stuff NOW but AI already works on super computers so … it’s all a matter of time and I think it’s cruel to let young people run into a hopeless dream but that’s me.
I think it is cruel but I also think young people misunderstand the role of graphic designers and are mis-sold it by bad University marketing departments and even the graphic design press. We are not artists, the opposite really, artists strive for an authentic and unique voice, graphic design uses artistic skills to target audiences with the appropriate artistic voice - sometimes unique, sometimes conforming. It is an industrial process that employs creative skills.
Even a lot of people who like to call themselves graphic designers don't understand this. I see it constantly with the attempted submissions to the sub, which are not graphic design half the time, but illustration, digital art or photo retouching. AI affects artwork, all of those things, not as much graphic design, not the artwork's implementation with type, not its implementation on a document, or where particularly large amount of graphic design funding goes: on packaging and products.
AI may make the mechanics of graphic design easier, but not the technical side (esp, typography and production outcome goals), not in the medium term. Graphic design is too context-dependent and fluid for AI to keep up as it stands and with its current model. The future still holds that the graphic designer - the last custodian and technician of document/product readiness before its mass-production - will persist. You may not think this is where money is earned in the field, but it is. Vast sums of revenue are spent on just this, not necessarily the "creative" side.
The role may change name, may become production designer or art director and divide along those paths, but nothing customers have come to me for in 15,000 design jobs would be better answered by AI, except where they want me to illustrate, which is a handful of jobs and worth a fraction of a percentage of revenue earned. The industry has grown by 2.6% in the past year, but is due for a 35% diminishing due to AI overall. This is kind of normal in the industry, it ebbs and flows.
In professional studios, we've been using stock templates, vectors, photos and footage for a decade now and it has only grown the industry. Typography is too complex due to outside factors and contexts, that even accounting for these and feeding it into an AI will require a designer's curation and take a similar amount of time. I just reject flat-out doomerism over it, I know the supply chain well enough to know where the work will persist and have mentioned it repeatedly here, at this point.
You should really read what I said. And saying this as a moderator, we expect this much from the community when they respond to comments and posts. Respectfully, please read posts before responding. I am therefore removing your comment.
Nothing about professional design that earns the vast majority of revenue from the field has any crossover with making the artwork for an Avatar banner. That's an illustrator's job. I did you the courtesy of reading your utterly misinformed wall of text. Read my wall of text and you'll be better informed. Graphic design is customised and informed data-entry a lot of the time. Data-entry is still necessary in an AI world and as much of a task. That won't change easily - as the web bubbles have shown already. Just means a little less clicking-and-dragging and a lot more copy and pasting. All your comments and those like them show me is how little people know about what a graphic designer does. The measure we've taken in this sub to curb this is filtering self-submissions to reject illustration, digital art, vector art and photo retouches, but we're a mere drop in the ocean of graphic design commentary which likes to lump them all in together. They're not the same, despite skill crossovers and they are the part of the so-called graphic design industry which will be hit unfortunately, but professional graphic design isn't going anywhere.
Alright, I'm done with you. I honestly don't know what your point other than rank doomerism is at this stage. You have nothing to back up any of your claims and show patent ignorance on the whole graphic design supply chain - especially the industrial production end of it, whether it's motion, print or manufacturing (or in-house which includes all of the former). Graphic design does not mean artworker, they're separate roles. My initial comment literally addresses the "99%" of graphic design jobbers out there doing the wide majority that makes up the boring work that keeps the industry ticking over. Did you still not read it?
You're also just being a dick of a commentor, opening with "I'm not reading your post", and I'm still not convinced you've read it.
Estimates indicate that AI (or what it really is: Automation) will account for a 35% diminishing of design needs at most, and while saying this, the industry is still currently in a period of growth, because the digital world needs enormous data-entry of designed material to function. The industry always ebbs and flows with technology changes. Big drop when computers came in, then it came back, automation will be similar. As automation comes in, our job will still be to steward the automation.
Also, if you think my words are fancy, I'd say get off reddit and read writers instead of internet comments for a while, I'm starting to think your problem is just your reading.
Oh, I see, you're not actually a graphic designer but a web designer. Yeah, so you actually have no clue what you're talking about then to be honest. Very different jobs. I've more than 20 years in the *graphic design* industry, at every level of the supply chain - freelancer, print tech, studio work, in-house work, publications, consultancy and have done illustration too on the side, which I'm happy to leave to the robots, it has never been a money maker like graphic design. I've done local walk-ins, online tenders, national work, international work, all of it, survived it and am still thriving in it. I'm speaking to you with the views and experience of not just myself, but the dozens to 100s of colleagues I've worked with in the industry, not to mention the 1000s of designers I've engaged with on this sub. Maybe read what I'm saying and pay some heed instead of being willfully ignorant, spouting nonsense and lowering the tone of discourse in the sub.
Come at me with that attitude once more and I *will* ban you.
Against … Asians ? Like … the Anime eventing everything straight As and every work at home mom draws / design on a Wacom Asia ? They don’t wait for you honey. I am really sorry but you need to combine art with something. Become an art teacher or design teacher because they have already a really big talent pool and they will work for MUCH less.
I do 25 an hour and I get a ton of work. I can turn around shorts and social content in like an hour and charge for 4 hours of work.... So it is still like getting paid 100/hr for me.
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This is the actual answer. Charging hourly punishes you for being efficient and more experienced. It also completely ignores the concept of rush fees when there’s a higher than average demand on your time. The ideal should be to calculate what you’re fee per hour is based your living expenses/desired annual revenue and then from there estimate how long a project should be, times that by your hourly cost, add about 20% for taxes etc and then charge someone a deposit for project initiation.
I think it depends on the kind of work you do. You can certainly have contracts for the typical design work e.g. branding but i have had quite a few corporate clients where the work didn’t fit into the ‘heres a text doc, design this up as a…’ and is very iterative. Charging hourly made much more sense, i even just started charging one client $4000 a month for the work.
This is a great breakdown. Thank you, I had not thought of this.
It punishes you if you charge flat rate if they take up more of your time with daft input
If the scope is defined, fixed price doesn’t mean they can just keep asking for revisions forever - but managing scope is absolutely critical if doing fixed price work versus hourly.
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Imo you’re absolutely correct, and this is a common way to be making money as a contractor. If you can get paid $5,000 for a project, and get it done a week less than the competition, its not like the customer is unhappy that you got it done faster and you walk away with a higher labor rate. This takes some calculation on what to charge but it’s a far better way to freelance.
Production graphic designers literally have infinite work, being paid hourly is the only viable option (or salary, but with the overtime we get it's a hard pass). That said, our pay is hardly competitive since there's no real competition in my area.
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Damn, maybe I should go independent. I work for a large promotional apparel company and we're stuck with the rates they set and the quotas we need to meet.
Any advice on figuring out billing per project? I feel like you can shoot yourself in the foot with this too if the initial quote is too low and then the project takes longer than expected. How do you go about dealing with this?
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I use a project rate with a specified number of edits/rounds. If they go over a certain number/hours, they get billed an additional fee (usually high and by the hour at that point). It covers your butt on labor as well as making the client more specific and careful about edit requests.
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I also give them an overview of where we stand in the process: I.e. “this is round 2, there’s one more round included in the project fee.”
Hourly rates are great for people who dig ditches. Use a sliding scale...If you are developing a logo/identity system for a local coffee shop and you like the folks and they'll throw in free coffee, charge them $1,200 for example. If a large business comes to you, same deliverable is $75k.
Yep, charge the value of the project, not the value of your time. If the value of the project doesn't at least cover the value of your time then don't take it.
Agreed! I've found designers to be their own worst enemies. Don't charge hourly rates! Your education, skills, experience and value you bring to the table are what a client pays for not how much time it takes you to do something. Don't commoditize yourself.
Agreed. Whenever possible, charge based on the value you deliver, not by the time you spend.
I'm rather confused how people charge hourly. Do they say "this costs 20 hours"? What happens if they spend more time? Or do they spend an undetermined number of hours on a project, which the client has to pay for despite not knowing?
I think this underestimates the number of good clients that just need a handyman approach to their design work. They don’t want creative briefs. They don’t want mood boards. They don’t want a whole process. They just want it done. And in that case, you just charge more per hour if you’re efficient. Or you have a minimum charge for work. For me even if a change takes five minutes if I have to make a change it’s at least a half hour billed. I work with a lot of schools and nonprofits. They are great clients. And I could never imagine trying to do each of the projects they toss at me on a project basis rather than just charging them for the hours I’m working. The only exception for me at least is very large projects like magazine layout, for which I will quote an upfront price .
I own an small agency and would love this. Issue is we have had designers just go rogue and then get pissed when we reject work.
Not if you charge enough per hour.
Yup I only charge by the project
No, you just adjust the hourly to your rate overall. I think figuring out how many hours a task takes me is the best way to budget for a job. The reason this works is that if your client wants more hours, you charge them more. So if you give a range for a homepage design, for example, you add in "this cannot exceed 60 hours" or something like that. It's all about managing the expectations of your client. I also don't want to overcharge my clients. I want to give them a good value, otherwise they won't come back or recommend me to others.
Freelance design shouldn’t be charged hourly - it’s an outdated model. Charge a fixed amount per project.
you will end in “neverending project” situation
Not if you clearly discuss scope of work before going into a project. And when it does go over you immediately contact your client before you do anything. Communication is key, and most designers don't know how to talk to their clients and be proactive
we know how to talk to clients. but clients are unreasonable assholes sometimes. You make it clear that you will charge after so many revisions then they fight you on it or withhold payment cause they didn’t get their way
I’ve in industry for 20 years, I know how things in real life work 😭
Genuine question, Why no posts then? new account, or just you ask other connections you’ve made when you have logo design questions?
just curious observer
Why wouldn’t you communicate the number of revisions included in your price in the beginning of a project?
Because they've been "in the industry for 20 years" so they can't be wrong. Charging by project is objectively superior. There is still a place for hourly rates but it shouldn't be the default. It's funny when people pull that card as their only defense. The reality is that you can easily do something wrong for 10, 20, 50 years if you are never challenged on it.
That's more about client management. Two rounds of amends included in the quote, any subsequent rounds incur additional charges, iron clad brief and scope of work, including agreed timelines. Not saying that clients won't try and push boundaries etc, but it's incumbent on yourself to manage the situation.
you got “brief”?!
"I'll know if when I see it"
You have to build your brief, it's part of the service, and should be paid for in the fees.
https://preview.redd.it/b70fbgjv4puc1.jpeg?width=520&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9f945e69d83b1930085382ea4d2b8f48db9d6ab5
Yes, we are.
Uh yeah, good luck getting overseas workers willing to work for pennies on the dollar to agree on that, as well as the brain dead CEOs willing to dumpster dive in the Fiverr talent cesspool for those prices. Best to just ignore it altogether and work for people who value your time and work.
Yeah, OP sets price at 50$ and i put it at 45$ and get all the work. You now undercut me at 40$ to get all the clients and OP is now very overpriced. You and i need 40k yearly just to live but the guy on fiverr in india only needs 5000 yearly so he asks for 8$. Op is now priced outrageously. Welcome to the free market
this is why the free market doesn’t work.
Yeah it’s a race to the bottom no matter what we talk about
Is there a reason for mentioning India? Racism is really rampant here huh.
I’m not sure it’s so much to do with racism rather than the fact that it is were i [mostly hear about outsourcing](https://www.business-standard.com/amp/companies/news/amazon-s-just-walk-out-checkout-tech-was-powered-by-1-000-indian-workers-124040400463_1.html). My last company had outsourced their whole IT help desk (70.000 man company) to india. Googleling cost of living [returns 1200$ per month for a family of 4](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=India#) In reality i’m in europe so poland or rumania or estonia would be more relevant refference for me but i try to use international refferences online. And this was a matter of a service like fiverr where tasks are uploaded to the internet so all are remote and thus any place with internet is relevant so i just needed a low cost of living area. Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Nigeria, Nepal, make your pick. Heck it could be a guy in a hut in wyoming (no one wants to live there right?) who just lives cheap for all i care
Except you could've just stopped at Fiverr. But you felt the need to mention India. Or any other country where the cost of living is low. Well I'll give it a pass. If your clients are going to Fiverr for designers, then maybe you need to pitch to better clients. Not a single business that is serious about their design ever goes to fiverr. Not even in India. Even if they do, it's not a problem of undercutting prices but typical corporations trying to squeeze out as much as possible by paying as low as they can. This is true for any country regardless. It's just that designers from these countries are easier to underpay not because of their lower living cost but because of the low opportunities for income most of the citizens have.
lots of design mills in brazil and china too.
there will always be someone that will undercut you at that price.
It'll never happen. The reach that Reddit has in the industry might as well be zero.
Let's all agree on $200/hour. Agreed? Great. That should put an end one of the world's problems.
🙌
The problem is the diploma mills spitting out students year after year after year into a marketplace that is already saturated, and now, thanks to globalization and the internet, is competing with much lower COL countries than the US
And if that was not enough AI is the cherry on top.
A shit-covered, pre-digested, synthetic cherry at that. But it's probably filled with electrolytes! And consumers crave electrolytes!
The problem is nobody values design. You could say the same about hairdressers or lawyers, but people seem to view most other careers as 'you get what you pay for' in terms of quality and they don't with design.
And one of the main reasons nobody values the work is because there are so many who are willing to undercut the market rate just to get their foot in the door. I mean, I get it, I understand. People have got to eat. But it's proved to be a race to the bottom. My referencing the diploma mills (I don't know if they still exist, but in the 90's they were everywhere (The Art Center, others) is referencing directly the complaints of professional designers who taught there. They taught, but they were NOT allowed to fail students, since the whole grift for the school was the federal matching funds for enrolled and graduating students. Yes, computers in the 90s made design more accessible for the masses. But the grift was strong.
Perk of living in eastern europe I guess.
I'll never fault a customer for traveling the world via their laptop in order to find a price that fits their budget. And I'll never fault someone living on the other side of the world who can make their living by servicing clients at less than the rates required to make a living in the USA. Computers and the internet changed the game. I benefited from being in front of the curve in the 90s by using those tools myself. It's just the nature of progress at this point. I'd highly recommend to anyone that working on other people's projects has no sustainability for most. And the way forward is to find a way to work your own IP, or partner up for a partial share of IP ownership in a contracted, mutually beneficial relationship with an IP owner. There WILL be a pendulum swing back to consumers/clients wanting bespoke creative solutions. It's a few years away yet, but once EVERYTHING starts feeling the same, it will happen. At least I hope so.
Between AI and a globalized workforce, good fucking luck
Fivrr ruined graphic design prices for small entry level designers
sorry dawg supply and demand
Dude just discovered supply and demand concept
I’ve never once charged hourly, I charge flat rates for projects. They get 2 rounds, beyond that they incur another flat rate per round. Charge by value and experience not hours.
I charge per project instead of per hour. I know some people will give me flak for that, but it allows me to pad and bake in a few hours while also moving away from detailing my hourly rate. If they move out of the scope of the project then I have the ability to charge a "priority rate" to make sure I still get my bag lol You're right that there should be higher per hour rates, but think of them like opticals. Opticals want you to buy glasses yearly but the reality is most people stop by once every few years at best. Depending on the quality, they charge more or less for their frames and the experience. Some of us are better, some are worse, some can command a higher price and others are barely scraping by. There are too many variables. But I get the frustration nonetheless!
This. People love project based pricing because in their head it’s closer to buying a custom product than it is to hiring a person. Even people making $50/hr do not want to pay you the same or more as it bruises their ego and this causes them to devalue your work. Project based also allows you to put in any additional fees, like rush/express pricing. Designers have to also begin to understand this is a business and there are psychological aspects of it just like any other business.
If you're living in an area where $25/hr isn't a livable wage you should be charging much more than $50/hr. But really you shouldn't be charging by the hour at all.
instead of trying to find a magical way to make everyone to charge the same, try to add more value to your work so you sell more in the price point that you aim to. Even if I was charging per hour, there is now way to charge 50$ where I live and stay on business. You just don't think about the global scale of graphic design and the localization of each economy. Even within the US there is a huge gap in cost of living and what the local clients can pay between the states, you can't dictate what to charge to anyone. [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-capita-income-by-state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-capita-income-by-state)
>So, if we all start charge $50-150 an hour Isn't this collusion for price fixing?
I guess so, I just learned about that yesterday. .
Price fixing is illegal and.... Soem dude on Fiverr is prolly gonna charge like 2 bucks and be fine with it
supply and demand.
price fixing is illegal in the US, is what the government would say.
The problem is to get them to pay
I don't charge hourly unless it's maintenance related. Flat fees for literally everything else. I'd lose my home if I charged hourly. Time is money and fast design isn't always terrible design.
Here here
I pay my graphic designer $55/hr on a 1099. He sets his schedule so long as the work gets done on time. We bill the client $85/hr. It's a win/win for both. He is not exclusive to me. He has several people that he contracts with, but I'm the highest paying (on purpose) and typically get preferential hours.
Pay per contract not per hour. The other problem is that the reason people are hesitant about paying higher is that there are so many junk designers out there - this causes clients to distrust the process.
Shouldn't pay hourly at all.
I don't even like the hourly wage. I'd rather work for less and get paid more.
You know why I charge so low for my work? Because no one will give me a job or let me freelance at those rates and I need to pay my fucking bills. Not all of us have the luxury to charge high prices and this sub really doesn't seem to get that.
fot that you need a union on the planetary level. I'm all up for it!
Won’t happen as many ‘self taught designers ‘ on instagram offer cheap prices
When a client asks for my hourly rate, I tell em good creatives are researching and thinking 24h a day. (At least that's my case) Usually that keeps them quiet.
I'm not familiar with the workings in the US, but here in the EU there's a few unions that can help with these things. Worth looking into!
Finding a union is the US is like finding gold lol
What would it take to start something like that? First locally off course, but who knows how far it can expand in the future
I would love that. My shop charges $15 an hour for design work. It's beyond frustrating knowing that for every hour I work on something my shop loses money. Sure we might make it up on the finished product, but if the customer walks, we lose money. If they customer orders a small amount we lose money. I never did this when I was a photographer, and no matter what I tell my boss he won't budge. We're a small town and he says if we charge too much customers will just go online. But we're so freaking busy, I think some customers should go online. My boss alone is 6 weeks out on work. Charging more and cutting some of them loose would be a boon to us.
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With AI on the horizon I expect wages in this industry to come down by a lot.
Bill by agreed contract amount with estimated hours included for tasks. Make it not to exceed, and bill as you go. If they don’t pay you stop working. Never deliver the final files until payed in full. Billing by hour sucks. I never go less than $100/hr if that’s requested as a time and materials contract. I also make them put up a retainer to work against doing it this way.
In my country, I can live well with 20€ an hour.
I wish we could afford to leave our situation
Yea, sadly $20 ain't much in the US. Maybe 15 years ago it was though
I charge $35 hourly, but I freelance on the side for two regular clients to build up my creative portfolio. My day job is boring production design, and I'd never be able to grow a portfolio from my work at it due to an NDA. Both my clients are fairly new companies that can't afford $50 hr rates. They need a designer, and I need experience, so we found a happy middle ground. With how my relationship is with my clients, I would be wasting more time communicating the cost of every little project if I priced it per item. I do, however, price one-off projects this way. If I started freelancing full time, I would certainly raise my wages. But I'm just not there yet on my journey.
Respect ✊
Perhaps you can, and perhaps you also convince people to do the same. However, not everyone listened to you. The way you break it down is quite impressive. There are more designers who are also in the line, and you know the competition in the industry. Newbies and hustlers may go down for their experience and for the money as well.
I don't disagree but as other people have put it charge per project, but what I would add to this is don't just say it's $50 to $150 for a banner (for example), because it won't be the designers overseas killing you with cheap labor, it will be the hybrid marketing people who will offer more complete services that will leave you in the dust when you enter that proce range and offer less for more. We can whine about the quality of the work all we want but the client isn't focused nor cares about the apex of good design, they just want to have something that works and to focus on their business and goals.
Here’s an idea… if you think a Reddit post is going to change “an industry” then you are an idiot. And I charge the high end of your scale.
You’ve gotta start somewhere
Nice vibes man 👍
Hang loose brother
This is a capitalist society. You are paid what you are worth to a company. You don’t make the rules, the company does
Hot take but just do tattoos then ? Because with the rise of AI y’all will be out of good jobs very soon. For me it’s just a hobby but if you have to live from it as a Boss I would pay Asians to do it cheaper and quicker or AI, so maybe go into tattoo design ?
You make an interesting comment from the perspective of a hobbyist, with a few common misconceptions on the job. The historically gate-kept professional design community is the main reason for these misconceptions, and even working junior designers are guilty of harbouring these misconceptions too, so they are not something to feel bad about, they're just inaccurate. We get a lot of users attempting to post artwork here and calling it graphic design, but it is not because that is not the role graphic designers are paid for. A graphic designer is more like a scribe than a painter a lot of the time. To be fair, AI is artwork supply. It cannot do what graphic designers do and you are showing that you indeed do not understand the professional world of graphic design by saying so. The industry survived the proliferation of clipart in the 90s, AI is much the same (but better, handier, and I love a lot of the tools). A big reason for this is the sheer volume of design needed in the industrial world as the principles of its society change, knowledge advances, and all of the recording of these demand new design. A lot of beginners start out making social media posts and design for the software space, but physical-space graphic design will stay where it is and none of my former employers have been effected - in fact some are still trying to hire me back. This is because a huge portion of the finance in graphic design goes to physical media or custom design, and the demand for that remains constant and parallel with the efficacy of the commercial economy. My domestic economy is outperforming the US' so we are not seeing the same employment difficulty in the sector. Anything on-site - signage, exhibition graphics, events' physical media, menus, name badges, anything that has to be manufactured, like packaging and labels etc, none of that employment will be touched by AI. It doesn't see well enough. It doesn't know about accessibile text sizing or even spelling correctly for a certain context. The physical work of measuring, placing and testing cannot be done by AI. What AI does here is make mockups easier, for "skinning" an establishment with its designs or generating context images of packaging to study Shelf Impact. Also education or information design cannot be done by AI. Laying out a medical device instruction sheet in 47 languages, in a consistently styled template, cannot be done by AI for example. It cannot make the English template look "the same" in Japanese, Arabic or Hebrew, languages which shift orientation of their sentences. Then setting it up with consideration for folding from an A3 page size down to fit in a 3cm x 10cm box cannot be done by AI. There are so-called AI infographics makers and they are just templates first of all. Templates have been available for free for years and something like template selection for customisation to a brand's continuity is a massive time-sink already, so not going to affect us. Secondly their systems are easier to use than InDesign, but are as, or more, involved and typically online, so too fragile for volume design work. A lot of hobbyists and juniors think of graphic design as the magazine cover, when it is mostly laying out the magazine. I welcome automation in this space, but it will still need designer implementation. As it stands, I am faster than these tools, faster again using some tools like Illustrator's vector generation AI. The problem with that tool is where if I ask it for a wine bottle for White Claw, there is a good chance that their minor competitors have already implemented that graphic, which would be unacceptable to such a market leader. Designers have had these conversations with such customers, I know because I have, as have many colleagues in the field, including one who worked on White Claw and is part of the largest brand designing company in the world. They never seem to stop hiring either. Lastly, the majority of the time I am hired as a designer, it is specifically because the templates, clipart, stock imagery and AI designs are all indistinct. Graphic design, by its very nature as a profession, is where people come for *custom* design work. AI is history based so it cannot ideate originality, which is what IBM wanted when I worked with them, or what HP wanted, or Lenovo, or Pfizer, P&G, it's what all the blue-chip design buyers want (usually for events or packaging). What you're talking about is artwork supply. Saying AI (in its current state) will replace graphic designers is akin to saying "Photographers will replace graphic designers". AI will have a much greater effect on artwork supply, and yes, going into tattoos or murals will prove to have lasting work over anything in the software space or templates for that. I do feel for anyone who fancied themselves as a vector or digital illustrator, that employment space has shrank considerably. But it is not graphic design or UX/UI design (the web's current layout design is still centuries behind print layout for example, it is a design space still in its infancy, with new best practices born every day), a lot of that will be unaffected. Mostly what US citizens or UK citizens are complaining about here is due to economic turmoil, not to do with AI or anything specific to the design industry. This is not to say art departments won't shrink, they will, but just for artists, photo retouchers or illustrators, not graphic designers, and just in already-fragile businesses like the web, where it is notoriously difficult to make money. As for outsourcing, I invite anyone to try it. I would say a good 40% of my medium-scale businesses tried it before coming to me. A lot of the time, they either want to be over-the-shoulder of the designer at some point, or need updates too frequently or indepth for online communication to suffice. Again, this is a design market for single issue, low-output design - the magazine cover. This is not where the finance is spent in the design industry. Salaried jobs with benefits go to designers working in volume-design environments or on-site/events graphics - so blue-chip branding, publications (especially those which are unsuitable to digital consumption, like medical device instructions or education where you have 100s to 1000s of pages designed), the legal field and reports generation, packaging, or with events, you often can't lock-down a schedule until a matter of days/hours prior - awards ceremonies are a good example of this. This "boring" work is what makes money in graphic design and is why in-house designer for finance companies or FinTech companies are some of the highest paid graphic design positions. You're mostly converting spreadsheets and filling the cells on styled tables, and when published, is a legal document so proofing often takes weeks. Boring but rigorous work. And I know one magazine cover artist who works on all the big publications in print, he is still refusing extra work and is currently touring Asia on a work break.
I correct the middle part for you : they can’t do some stuff NOW but AI already works on super computers so … it’s all a matter of time and I think it’s cruel to let young people run into a hopeless dream but that’s me.
I think it is cruel but I also think young people misunderstand the role of graphic designers and are mis-sold it by bad University marketing departments and even the graphic design press. We are not artists, the opposite really, artists strive for an authentic and unique voice, graphic design uses artistic skills to target audiences with the appropriate artistic voice - sometimes unique, sometimes conforming. It is an industrial process that employs creative skills. Even a lot of people who like to call themselves graphic designers don't understand this. I see it constantly with the attempted submissions to the sub, which are not graphic design half the time, but illustration, digital art or photo retouching. AI affects artwork, all of those things, not as much graphic design, not the artwork's implementation with type, not its implementation on a document, or where particularly large amount of graphic design funding goes: on packaging and products. AI may make the mechanics of graphic design easier, but not the technical side (esp, typography and production outcome goals), not in the medium term. Graphic design is too context-dependent and fluid for AI to keep up as it stands and with its current model. The future still holds that the graphic designer - the last custodian and technician of document/product readiness before its mass-production - will persist. You may not think this is where money is earned in the field, but it is. Vast sums of revenue are spent on just this, not necessarily the "creative" side. The role may change name, may become production designer or art director and divide along those paths, but nothing customers have come to me for in 15,000 design jobs would be better answered by AI, except where they want me to illustrate, which is a handful of jobs and worth a fraction of a percentage of revenue earned. The industry has grown by 2.6% in the past year, but is due for a 35% diminishing due to AI overall. This is kind of normal in the industry, it ebbs and flows. In professional studios, we've been using stock templates, vectors, photos and footage for a decade now and it has only grown the industry. Typography is too complex due to outside factors and contexts, that even accounting for these and feeding it into an AI will require a designer's curation and take a similar amount of time. I just reject flat-out doomerism over it, I know the supply chain well enough to know where the work will persist and have mentioned it repeatedly here, at this point.
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You should really read what I said. And saying this as a moderator, we expect this much from the community when they respond to comments and posts. Respectfully, please read posts before responding. I am therefore removing your comment. Nothing about professional design that earns the vast majority of revenue from the field has any crossover with making the artwork for an Avatar banner. That's an illustrator's job. I did you the courtesy of reading your utterly misinformed wall of text. Read my wall of text and you'll be better informed. Graphic design is customised and informed data-entry a lot of the time. Data-entry is still necessary in an AI world and as much of a task. That won't change easily - as the web bubbles have shown already. Just means a little less clicking-and-dragging and a lot more copy and pasting. All your comments and those like them show me is how little people know about what a graphic designer does. The measure we've taken in this sub to curb this is filtering self-submissions to reject illustration, digital art, vector art and photo retouches, but we're a mere drop in the ocean of graphic design commentary which likes to lump them all in together. They're not the same, despite skill crossovers and they are the part of the so-called graphic design industry which will be hit unfortunately, but professional graphic design isn't going anywhere.
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Alright, I'm done with you. I honestly don't know what your point other than rank doomerism is at this stage. You have nothing to back up any of your claims and show patent ignorance on the whole graphic design supply chain - especially the industrial production end of it, whether it's motion, print or manufacturing (or in-house which includes all of the former). Graphic design does not mean artworker, they're separate roles. My initial comment literally addresses the "99%" of graphic design jobbers out there doing the wide majority that makes up the boring work that keeps the industry ticking over. Did you still not read it? You're also just being a dick of a commentor, opening with "I'm not reading your post", and I'm still not convinced you've read it. Estimates indicate that AI (or what it really is: Automation) will account for a 35% diminishing of design needs at most, and while saying this, the industry is still currently in a period of growth, because the digital world needs enormous data-entry of designed material to function. The industry always ebbs and flows with technology changes. Big drop when computers came in, then it came back, automation will be similar. As automation comes in, our job will still be to steward the automation. Also, if you think my words are fancy, I'd say get off reddit and read writers instead of internet comments for a while, I'm starting to think your problem is just your reading. Oh, I see, you're not actually a graphic designer but a web designer. Yeah, so you actually have no clue what you're talking about then to be honest. Very different jobs. I've more than 20 years in the *graphic design* industry, at every level of the supply chain - freelancer, print tech, studio work, in-house work, publications, consultancy and have done illustration too on the side, which I'm happy to leave to the robots, it has never been a money maker like graphic design. I've done local walk-ins, online tenders, national work, international work, all of it, survived it and am still thriving in it. I'm speaking to you with the views and experience of not just myself, but the dozens to 100s of colleagues I've worked with in the industry, not to mention the 1000s of designers I've engaged with on this sub. Maybe read what I'm saying and pay some heed instead of being willfully ignorant, spouting nonsense and lowering the tone of discourse in the sub. Come at me with that attitude once more and I *will* ban you.
Maybe I will just move to Asia and freelance instead
Against … Asians ? Like … the Anime eventing everything straight As and every work at home mom draws / design on a Wacom Asia ? They don’t wait for you honey. I am really sorry but you need to combine art with something. Become an art teacher or design teacher because they have already a really big talent pool and they will work for MUCH less.
There exists an ethical guide to pricing that breaks down what all graphic artists should be charging.
I do 25 an hour and I get a ton of work. I can turn around shorts and social content in like an hour and charge for 4 hours of work.... So it is still like getting paid 100/hr for me.
I think this is called price fixing and it's illegal