DESIGNA MAGAZINE DESIGNA ISSUE III 2019 2 | Page 101

sense, right? You know how long it will take you to do something,
you price for it, everyone is happy. you create for them. They essentially, legally, become the author of
your work.
Unfortunately this is a half-truth. Sure you're getting paid well
enough and certainly making more hourly than you probably were
at your old day job, but I'll paint a picture as to why this is a
flawed pricing model: Two designers are hired to produce posters
for a music festival. Both have the same hourly rate of Kshs. 1000
per hour (a reasonable rate for someone who's been in the biz for
a few years and has a few accolades under their belt), but one
designer works much faster than the other. Both are equally
talented, but one is far more efficient. At the end of the job, the
designers turn in their invoices--he worked on it for a total of 18
hours and she a total of seven hours. He is paid a respectable fee
of Kshs 18,000 and she Kshs. 7,000 for producing the same result.
Your rational mind says “Well, he did work more hours than
her...” but part of you knows that this isn't completely fair. This
becomes epically clear when working for big name clients. As for a graphic designer, work for hire is a bit more acceptable in
many situations since you're not authoring new content as much
as creating a beautiful context for other people's content (speaking
specifically about any sort of layout design).
Where rights management usually
comes into play is in the context of
identity work, and this is why
logos are priced the way they are.
It's understood that the clients will
need the rights to the mark you
create so that they can trademark
it and use it on unlimited
applications, so when pricing for a
logo you should take that into
account. In addition to a fair
hourly rate, clients pay for the
rights to use that logo in an
unlimited capacity.
Here's another scenario: You're hired to do a monogram for a giant
international company. They'll want to use this monogram on
everything from price tags to billboards to TV spots and they
want to use it forever (in perpetuity until the sun explodes). They
have a pretty clear idea of what they want and you know that it
will take about 10 hours total with the initial exploration, back
and forth revisions, and finalizing. Even if your hourly rate is
Kshs. 2,500 / hour (a pretty high rate), the total you're earning for
that logo is Kshs. 25,000. If you think that is a good price for a
professional designer to earn crafting what is essentially a logo for
a huge company, you are mistaken. So if you aren't pricing hourly,
how DO you price?
2. Licensing and Rights-Management
Most designers take into account the hours they'll put into a
project when coming up with a price, but the seasoned
professionals use it as part of the way they quote a project, and not
as the only defining factor. Once you feel comfortable with your
hourly rate and can somewhat accurately predict how long it will
take you to do something, you have to consider a few other things
that will boost your prices and turn this design hobby of yours
into an actual sustainable career.
As a designer, when you hear the term “rights-management,”
you're brought back to your intern days doing photo research,
trying to find non-awful royalty-free images after your boss told
you all the rights-managed photos were way too expensive. How
does rights-management apply to a designer or illustrator?
Photographers aren't the only ones able to manage the rights of
their work. You inherently own the rights to anything you create,
this is why it's incredibly important to read every contract for
every job. Often times clients want more rights than what they
are willing to pay for--the biggest red flag word being “work for
hire.” This means that the client owns all the rights to anything
Aside from giving away all the rights to your work for an
additional (hopefully ginormous) fee, you can give them away for
limited periods of time or for limited applications by licensing
work to clients. There are fewer ways to do this as a graphic
designer, but licensing is an incredibly (incredibly!) important part
of being an illustrator or letterer. Of the couple hundred client
projects I've done over the past few years, very few of them have
required a full buyout of all rights, and the ones that have required
them paid my rent for the better part of a year. Here are some
factors that go into pricing a job based on licensing:
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How long does the client want to license the artwork for? One
month? One year? Two years? Five years? In perpetuity?
In what context is the artwork going to be used? Do they have
the rights to use it on anything? In print only? Web only?
Broadcast? Tattooed on their faces?
If the job is reprinted, will there be an additional fee for a
reprint?
Do they want an unlimited license or do they need to own the
rights?
May
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June 2019 | D E S I G N A