I recently went to a presentation about how to price your work properly, and I’d want to share my notes/thoughts.

It’s hard to live as a freelancer, especially in the field of art and design. Art/design is not a necessity? It’s arguable. Most clients don’t understand the true value of a work, and they can’t afford to pay their hard earned cash for things based on perception. What really bothers me are those websites and contests that take people’s work/ideas for dirt-cheap or no money at all! The bottom line is how can we as artists and designers help each other out? How to bring up our market value?

Here are my notes from the presentation:

• Know what you worth
  Know the business, market by location, category(understand the demand), client, and how other perceived value of the product.
• Understand your capability, competition and risk tolerance
• Type of pricing
  -Hourly
  -Project based-someone was being very adamant about never do a logo for less than $250. It makes sense, but it’s probably easier said than done especially for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience.
  -Retainer (get paid first)
  -I come up with a rule myself-try to estimate how much time you will put in the work, and times how much you want to get paid hourly-easy enough right?:)
  -Decide your hourly wage- you can think about your expenses and your opportunity cost
• Know the work and get back with a proposal
  Give yourself enough time to think through the scope of work, the proposal should contains details about alternation, charge for additional work, outline specific numbers of items/functions you will deliver.
• Educate your clients-(This is VERY IMPORTANT, and it’s true in every field, people come to you because they think you are the expert. And as the expert, you have the right to educate and so they know what you did for them.)
• Specs.-find a object, maybe a company, a campaign as a target, create specs and use it for your portfolio.

*supposedly I took more notes than this but somehow I didn’t save everything- -||

Well I hope you enjoy reading this and please share your thoughts!