Pricing Design Work & Creativity (The Guide)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in threads on freelance design pricing and why large corporations pay a lot for branding work.
What it is
The Futur's guide to pricing design and creative work, arguing against hourly rates and for value-based pricing. It features Blair Enns and says to price the client, not the job.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dmlittle · 2020-11 · on “Ask HN: How much do you pay/charge for a website homepage design?”
It depends what work you're doing and for whom you're doing it. This is a pretty good talk about pricing design work [1]. This is also why a lot of companies have a "Contact Us" enterprise pricing. You might have 2 different companies using the same product in the same way but paying a 10x difference. They're doing value based pricing and different companies value different things at different rates. [1] [this video]
Cites bsanr2 · 2019-04 · on “Much of the “science” used in design is bullshit (2014)”
That's almost certainly what's happening. The pricing of logo design and branding is about how much it's worth to the client and how much risk the designer is taking on [0]. This design firm put its name on a logo for an international corporation worth billions of dollars and people made fun of it for looking like a fat dude; that's a major embarrassment whose potentiality was probably considered in the pricing. The same people chuckling at how nonsensical the design document is supposed to be (and it really isn't) are probably the same people who could talk your ear off about the esoteric particulars of a given programming language or management strategy, which are also, to some degree, sub
Cites jazzyjackson · 2022-07 · on “Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)”
it's psychological but maybe also pragmatic if your billion dollar business relies on the web site working well, you wouldn't think of trusting it to a small freelancer that quotes you 50k or whatever, it's almost like they start with a budget in mind (7 digits ought to do it) and then find someone who will take that much money disclaimer: I have no experience here but I think this lecture on pricing design touches on it, that big corps aren't going to touch you if you're not charging them outrageous fees [0] [this video]