I have been approached by a small local coffee shop to design a new logo / brand.

Most of my work is for large corporates, but in these straightened times I am taking whatever I can get!

My question is what to charge? Branding and logo design for a big company is usually billed at £000’s, any ideas or experience of what to price a project like this at?

WGA

At the moment I pay £35 per hour for the graphic designer I use. But I have been using him for years. He’s based in Edinburgh btw if that has any relevance to pricing.

We recently did a re-branding exercise. I involved my graphics guy but my director wanted to use an agency. The agency charged £2,500. Later found out from my designer that the agency asked a mate of his to do the work freelance and paid him £200. I didn’t mention that to my director.

So either base it on an hourly rate or go for a ‘branding fee’. £500 would seem reasonable to me.

Times the amount of hours taken to complete by your hourly rate.

Surely it is the same for big corporates – they just expect much more than a simple logo, they want a brand identity, guidelines, fully considered versions for different media, language, palettes, secondary typefaces so it goes into the £££££££££££££££££s

It depends whether or not they want something “off the shelf” or whether they think they are hiring you for bespoke custom logo tailoring and tweaking for as long as they want until they are happy.

Regardless of what you quote, clients tend to assume the latter is included…so you need to make it abundantly clear that whilst you are willing to tailor the logo to their tastes, any authors alterations to final artwork that they’ve signed off on a proof, will be extra and charged at an hourly rate.

Dont get suckered into quoting a price and then being forced to stick to it whilst they mull over multiple revisions. Quote an approximate and give your self some room to manouevre within that price, be sure and account for every phone call and conversation you have with them, every mile you drive etc so you can break the price down if things go south.

About £40 an hour is a good ball park for freelancing, I’d be quoting for at least £600, and expect that to go up with revisions.

Thanks for the feedback, the last logo I did the bill came to £2,000, with all the revisions etc.

I will have a chat with them and see what their budget expectations are.

WGA

we do branding for £500.

£2k is agency money, there is no way I would pay a freelance designer that sort of cash for a logo.

The clear distinction is the difference between a logo and branding.

I run an agency and I will do a logo for peanuts as I can whip one together in minutes, but a properly considered, researched and applied brand takes much, much more time and therefore money. IIRC the most I have charged for a brand exercise was just short of £5k, but I often do logos for a couple of hundred quid and even done them for free (just so a client website has something acceptable as a logo on it).