From my experience as a freelancer, the price of a logo can range from $20 to $100, the price of a flyer can start from $20 up to $50, the price of a poster can be between $50 to $100, the price of a banner can rise up to $250, the price of a business card can be a few tens of dollars, the price of a T-shirt design ranges between $15 to $250, and the price of designing a website starts from $200.
When it comes to payment, I suggest graphic designers to take account of three critical aspects of their designing process: effort (premium quality versus medium quality versus low-end), consultancy (listening to clients’ requirements and making suggestions), and work duration (time spent for research, actual work and fine tuning).
Effort
For starters, the level of quality requested by the client must not be omitted. Some clients are willing to pay a premium price for an exquisite design, whereas others have a limited budget. Taking this into consideration, the designer must know how much time and effort should be put into the project. Alternatively, most of the customers would impose a deadline for completing the concept, and that should also be considered when deciding the price.
Consultancy
Each and every graphic designer has to consult with his or her client before commencing the work on the requirements. From my experience, some of the customers were used to work with designers and knew how to tell precisely what they wanted, whilst most of them had not idea about marketing and advertising. Therefore, I had to ask the right questions and give plenty of suggestions to clients who were not so well informed about the creative part of their business. Nevertheless, a graphic designer should find out what the customer wants and must deliver the expected design, but it is ought to abide by marketing and advertising concepts. The latter can be difficult at times depending on the client`s preferences and level of understanding the concepts.
Work Duration
Last but not least, the work duration of the designing process may include consultancy for some of the customers, but for the others it is only a sum of research time, actual work and design improvement. The research part occurs after consulting the client and should be done in cooperation with the client. In this way, both the designer and the customer would know where the competitors are situated and what should be done in order to surpass them. Likewise, after gathering all the information, the time for completing the design should be easy to deduce. Consequently, the client should be presented with a draft of the design and further improvements would be made to the final concept.