How Much Should A Beginner Charge For A Logo Design | Pricing Guide
Let's find out how you should charge this specific creative service on a fair number!
As a logo design professional, you need to set up your price to distinguish yourself from your other competitors and strengthen your brand. While you can do voluntary design work for non-profit organizations at some points or help your closest ones with no-cost services, you should determine an ideal price range to (at least) make a living.
However, making a living through things we like to do (in this case, designing a logo) is not enough on its own. Each logo design project has its uniqueness in terms of its nature, and we should also pay attention to the ways we execute the projects as well.
The logo design services themselves are divided into at least seven categories. We will also have a look at the basic formula-related things that you need to calculate for your ideal rates.
The Charged Amounts Are Subject To The Formula Calculations
First of all, you shouldn’t use a per-project benchmark as your only element to calculate how much you should charge. It is because clients have varied needs per their requested designs, and we need to make sure we benefit from our time and efforts in creating the best graphic designs for the sake of our portfolios and the clients’ improved brand positions.
Hence, hourly rates are some other benchmarks we need to consider in our formula calculations. In general, the formula that we use to calculate how much we should charge takes into account our monthly expenses plus our (projected) profits from creating the logos according to different sets of categories.
Here, we need to remember that the monthly expenses also include expenses for our logo businesses, including buying and subscribing to software and tools for editing the pictures. Renewing our subscriptions and research-related matters also count in our monthly expenses. We will discuss more of the research phases in separate parts of this article.
Ideally, as logo design professionals, we only handle logo categories that fit our experiences, expertise, and the availability of resources to aid our work. As a result, we have to adjust our monthly expenses accordingly to the categories that match our expertise as logo professionals.
The Various Types Of Logo
Most people usually differentiate between 2D and 3D logos when another person asks them about the different logo design types. It is because the two-type differentiations are more convenient to think about: 3D pictures are always either moving or have some embosses that bring them closer to reality, while their 2D counterparts don’t share the same characteristics.
In reality, there are at least seven different logotypes. A professional in illustration design industries can master 1-3 of these entire categories. There are never jack-in-all-trades who can charge higher unless the illustrators are parts of a logo maker agency.
The seven different logotypes include letter marks, wordmarks, pictorial marks, logos with mascots, emblems, abstract logos, and the combination that involves two or more of these logo design categories.
The first two categories seem to be the easiest to make because we just need to summarize all about the company. The decent letter marks or wordmarks typically cost around $20 before tax and any other deductions. So, it’s not surprising for us to see logo designers charging around $20 (or even $35) for these types of projects.
The surprising news is that emblems can cost the same as letter marks and wordmarks. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be afraid to charge high prices for logos with mascots, particularly when you need to show the mascot models in 3D ways.
Highly skilled graphic design professionals can charge these types of illustrating projects for up to $10,000 per logo they create. However, such things as the different logo types are just the beginning in determining how much we can charge.
Research Your Market Profiles
Typically, people who need logo design services are independent and group business owners. Large-scaled companies don’t tend to partner with independent graphic illustrators and have more specific requirements that only highly experienced and skilled vendors can handle.
As a result, we can say that small-and-medium enterprises and startups tend to be regular clients for logo design projects. Their net earnings are typically identical to the average or perhaps even minimum living costs of the city they mainly operate in.
We should take their growth steps into account. All businesses will eventually face four life cycle phases in their businesses: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline, regardless of how much their monthly or yearly earnings are. The first two life cycle phases are the phases where we can charge more for our graphic design services.
In particular, we can charge 2-3 times higher prices when the company is in the Growth process. It’s nearly impossible for companies in Declining phases to order anything from external parties (including external designers). Hence, you want to skip the offers from the companies.
Then, again, the market profile doesn’t stop in the companies’ life cycles. We also need to dig deeper into what products they sell and what are their best-selling or signature products. From there, we can adjust our service packages that meet the company’s objectives and are compatible with their economic conditions.
For instance, our average logo design service pricing plans start from $49 per two 2D letter mark logos. We impose a minimum order of six logos in one order. The primary market targets for us are small-and-medium enterprises with earnings and incomes of at least 10-15 times our charged amounts, which are $49 * 6/2 * 10 = $1,470 at least.
Consider The Places They Order Your Logo Design Services
Often, these small-and-medium-sized companies order logo design services through reputable online platforms for designers. Some examples include 99designs, Fiverr, Etsy, and DesignCrowd.
These entire online platforms have their policies for graphic designers, including how much should the minimum and maximum amounts they should charge for their services. At some points, you can even find more about the ways you calculate the amounts you can charge on their FAQs and Zoom Meeting schedules with other workers.
Take Upwork’s interfaces as an example. You know your regular logo service prices are $550. However, putting exactly $550 as your price tag as an Upwork logo designer means you will receive around $400-ish after taxes and other deductions.
The same thing also applies when you have to charge for your services on other online platforms. Even on platforms with value for money, such as Guru.com, the workers will always have their service charges deducted from the platform’s costs.
Even if some of these platforms give incentives for high-skilled workers, such as deducting platform costs from their design service charges, you will still need to include the deductions in your mind when you think about how much you should charge.
On the other hand, creative workers tend to charge almost double their usual amounts when they go off the platform. It is because they have more freedom in determining how much they can get paid and earn daily, weekly, or monthly. You can do the same if you provide graphic design services both on several platforms and through your channels.
Previously, we’ve acknowledged that we should know what products become the signature products of the companies that we’re going to design the logos for. Such parts belong to the research parts of the whole logo design project.
Researching to design appropriate logo sketches is not only important to determine the color compositions and brush strokes we need for our logos. It also determines the minimum, average, and maximum prices of our graphic design services charges.
Furthermore, the research parts are also the things that make complex-looking logos more expensive than logos with simpler elements, even though the complex logos are in 2D forms. In addition, the lesser research materials the clients provide us with, the more likely we have to accept higher charges for our picture design services.
After all, we need to dig deeper into the companies’ goals, plans, the ways they engrave the company values onto their employees, and other aspects. The easiest step would be to investigate the company’s history, in which we can get a glimpse through their “About Us” page.
Sometimes, the company even pinpoints some historical figures on their Homepage or primary Dashboard. We may also do additional research on their financial and annual reports and market share positions and compare this entire news with external conditions to project how their future will turn out to be.
Don’t be afraid to charge more for these thoroughly-done researches, since such researches take time. At some points, the company may assign you to company visits where you get to observe how the employees are working for extra charges. In such situations, you can choose to accept the orders, or you can renegotiate the extras depending on the agreements.
Revision rounds you need to consider
Many logo designers include one revision round for their entire service packages. It is because one-time revision is the safest choice. We observe that all graphic illustrators will eventually face at least a one-time revision round for their entire projects, regardless of their experience and expertise levels and whether they’re working independently or in groups.
We agree that revision rounds are necessary evils for all creative workers, including but not limited to people who regularly work with different logotypes.
Additional minor revisions on the logo would likely cost at least 1/100 times the whole illustrator project budget. On the other hand, major tweaks or even starting from scratch can cost the same as the project budgets.
Take an example of a $450 logo project in which the goal is to strengthen the brand’s position. Such graphic projects have included one-time revisions for the entire logo in one project. So, you can charge an additional $4.5-$450 for one additional revision, from a minor revision to starting the designs from scratch.
At the same time, carefully measuring your capabilities in handling the project and understanding how your competitors are doing is the key to determining how many revision rounds you can include in your packages. Normally, it’s rare for entry-level graphic illustrators to include only one-time revisions in their charged logo services.
As an alternative, you can give one more extra revision round. For instance, your competitors in an online design platform normally charge $3,500 for a mascot logo design project with two times of minor until intermediate-leveled revision rounds.
You can charge the same amount for the same project nature. However, you can give three times revision guarantees, which is equal to one more revision round compared to your competitors’ two revision rounds.
Such things give your logo creation business extra bump-ups to the main website pages. Then, you can adjust the additional revision rounds’ pricing plans according to your clients’ needs.
The additional services you offer in your graphic illustrating packages
While it’s rather unusual for logo design professionals to include additional services apart from revisions and some other graphic design-related bonuses, these things also become things to think about while also considering how much you should charge.
Additional services can range from the “normal” additions to the more anti-mainstream ones. The “normal” additions include brand consulting sessions, financial health check-ups, moving graphic visualizations for Flash animation projects, and more.
On the other hand, more anti-mainstream additional services, such as donating some parts of the logo design work to a child who has suffered from bone cancers, allocating some parts of the designing projects to gold and mutual fund investments, and more, also exist.
The price ranges for these additional services can vary as much as their highly varied categories. Moreover, picture design professionals may have expertise and experiences outside their routines as people who work in the logo design areas. Such things also become yet other reasons to charge higher for the additional services.
Here, we take a logo designer who has experience in the finance and banking sectors apart from being capable of visualizing companies’ brands. He/She can charge higher prices for his/her additional services that involve the two sectors.
For instance, one of his/her service packages is $499 for one 3D mascot logo design for a startup company. In the package, he/she includes two times minor and major revision rounds and also 30-minutes financial consulting sessions based on the company’s annual reports.
He/She usually charges $2,000 for a 60-minute financial consulting session. For his/her logo maker packages, he/she can impose an additional charge of at least $50 for a 30-minute financial consulting session, which offers a friendly introductory price for the clients.
The same thing also applies to donating to causes. It’s not only the causes that we should pay attention to. When we dedicate our logo creation services while donating to causes that we have concerns about, we should make sure we actively update with reports regarding the causes we support.
Donating is unlike any other additional task type, and most people don’t tend to donate above 20% of the bundling packages. It is because people often refer to such percentages as profit sharing rather than donating. More precisely, people usually donate 5-10% of their whole bundling plans to trusted non-profit organizations that support the causes.
Let’s say we have a $1,500 graphic design payment plan that includes ten logo designs and three rounds of revisions, and we also donate 8% of the sold amounts to empower women who suffer from CPTSD. So, we have to adjust our payment plans with the additions of the 8% donation portions and the platforms’ deductions if we work on a platform.
Final Words
Services that involve designing a logo are, no doubt, some of the most varying-priced services. Nonetheless, it’s not impossible to find the formulas, so we can charge the correct amounts for our picture design services.
First thing first, we need to make sure we charge hourly and not only for the sake of the package alone. Only after we determine our hourly prices can we determine our service packages that usually end after days or even months.
For example, we’ve determined through careful formula calculations that our hourly price for designing a decent logo is $80. We can make three 2D pictures in a day, excluding minor and major revisions. So, we can charge $240 daily for our services.
For any service packages that require us to work once a week with 12 logos and two times revision rounds, we can charge $960, which falls in the price range of $900-$1,000. We can even add some extras to our packages, and revision rounds are just some of them.
Some designers even take it further by donating some parts of their work to trusted non-profit organizations. Such pricing plans will succeed when the designers know how they should conduct the research and be mindful of their clients’ market profiles.