Decoding Graphic Designer Cost: How Much Should You Actually Pay for Designs?

Are you one of those businesses contemplating the question whether to hire a graphic designer or outsource design services?

And with this question, the urge to know the graphic designer cost naturally gets included into the discussion. Knowing graphic designer cost is a pretty nice question to start with, especially when you have a limited budget and don’t want to waste it.

So, are you going to hire a graphic designer, outsource the design services, or seeking a satisfactory answer to your queries at the moment?

Well, this is where you’ll find all the necessary answers about graphic designer cost, whether to hire one or outsource the design services.

Why Hire a Graphic Designer At All?

Before we start discussing the graphic designer cost, let’s answer an even more important question.

Why do companies need to hire a graphic designer in the first place?

Imagine your company is a puzzle board and the graphic designer is the one who knows how to put every puzzle in place to make sense out of those pieces.

Like every company, yours has a brand identity that should have the right feel whenever you use any marketing collateral, brochure, and social media graphics or maybe update your website. By hiring a graphic designer, you’re getting one step closer to have an amazing brand identity that correctly represents your company VMVs through its graphic material.

In-house or Outsourced Graphic Designer?

Usually, companies have two options when it comes to hiring graphic designers – in house or outsource. Each option has a varying number in terms of graphic designer cost a company would be covering. To know how much a graphic designer cost to you, it’s important to understand the two major structures of design industry.

In-house Graphic Designer

In this structure, a company would hire a graphic designer as a permanent employee meaning the resource will be working from within your office space. The graphic designer would avail the same benefits as other employees do. As per the American Bureau of Statistics, a graphic designer makes around $35,430/- per year and an average $17/- to $27/- per hour.

Outsourced Graphic Designer

The second popular option, that companies have, is to outsource the services of a graphic designer. In this model, the organization is not liable to offer additional benefit to the graphic designer as she’s working on a contract or per project basis. There’s no standard graphic designer cost as each state has a different industry pricing rule for outsourcing a graphic designer.

Popular Graphic Design Work Patterns

Since we’ve discussed the in-house and outsourcing models to hire a graphic designer, it is important that we go deep into the details and explore some major patterns a graphic designer chooses to work. Here are some popular mediums a graphic designer would choose to offer her services.

Crowdsource: This pattern works on a bidding system where a buyer sets the bid for a creative work and auctions it to a pool of graphic designers. The designer with the best graphic design wins the bid and earns the prize money in return. An outsourced graphic design bid can start with minimum of $50/- and goes up to $1000/- or more.

Freelance Graphic Design Services: This model is similar to the outsourced one we described earlier reducing the graphic designer cost a company has to pay. The graphic designer works independently for the employer on per project base after setting her fee for the task. Each graphic designer sets her charges differently for all sort of design work.

Hour-Based Design Services: This model can be associated with freelancing but has slightly different terms than per project base. In this structure, the graphic designer charges the company on an hourly basis regardless of task’s total duration in days.

With this brief explanation of working patterns, you’d be able to better calculate the graphic designer cost for your next project.

Graphic Design Cost Breakdown

Now comes the most important part for graphic designer cost that you wanted to know!

Each US state and graphic designer has varying prices for the creative work. Some graphic designer cost lesser than others and some charge $100,000,000/- just for a logo design if it’s a big corporation like Accenture.

If you’re not sure how to calculate the graphic designer cost, here’s the pricing breakdown for you:

• Business cards – $50/- to $150/-
• Brochure/flyer – $100/- to $300/-
• Email newsletter – $50/- to $100/-
• Infographics – $100/- to $300/-
• Logo design – $100/- to $500/-
• Social media graphics – $25/- to $50/-
• Packaging design – $200/- to $500/-
• Marketing material – $50/- to $200/-

These prices are generally charged by graphic designers and offer you the clarity needed for calculating the graphic designer cost if you’re planning to hire one.

And with this, you’ve discovered all the key points for concluding the graphic designer cost. Just remember, the selection should be between your budget and quality of work to maintain the fine line between too expensive and too cheap graphic design.