WickedNat

Per hour? or per project?

August 26th, 2006

 One thing I’ve come to learn running a design studio — is that my clients don’t care if it takes me 2 hours or two weeks to create a design. But what they DO care about is that it’s done by the due date , that it is relevant to the brief and that it’s of a certain quality.

It would be easy to say that we should throw the whole idea of billing by the hour out the window and use the “value” of a project as the fee. But what exactly is this so-called “value”? The highest amount a client is willing to pay? Or how much you expect that it will be worth in the future, down the road? How do you determine the “value” of one logo to the next? Would there really be a difference in “value” from client to client? I’m sure that they would think that their logo was as “valuable” or as important as the next guy’s.

I guess the best thing that you can do, is be aware of all of the resources involved in completing the project, make a good estimation of your (time)costs and then tack your profit margin on top of it. Then be sure to comminicate to your client exactly what they should expect during the process: tangeable deliverables, due dates, expectations and clear pricing that makes sense to the client.

There is an excellent article on Signal v.s Noise debating this problem that many designers face:

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/picasso_paula_scher_and_the_
lifetime_behind_every_second.php

Technorati Tags: pricing, design, management, fees, projects

Entry Filed under: Design