Pricing a brochure--are we way off?

[jaredg27]

Hi,

We don't usually deliver traditional print design or offer marketing services, but a client came to us with a very immediate need and we wanted to help them. It took a lot of hours to deliver though, and I'm unsure what's considered reasonable for brochure-work.

A little background, that you can skip:

I run a fairly small technology business and recently employed a designer fulltime; he'd been working for an in-house design team for ten years prior to that, and I believe he does fantastic work. We've had a lot of success with automating Microsoft Office tools, and his responsibility has been to make those documents look really attractive. I believe he's very skilled at all facets of print design, but it's not what he does every day anymore.

Anyhow, the project was a tri-fold that was being delivered to a small company, that they were cobranding and delivering to a larger company (think Fortune 500 large). So they needed it to look more than just somewhat good, but it couldn't cost a fortune. In addition to the general layout, we had to work with:

• 3 different types of graphs, each of which took a bit of thought
• some copy changes driven by the client while we were designing (factor 2-4 hours for this)
• a client that wanted a lot of discussion time with us (so about 2.5 hours were spent just discussing things)
• a pressing deadline

When all was said and done we rushed their job in about 22 hours over 3 days. And I think it looked pretty good, though the client felt the graphs could've used more work (they're not the run of the mill easily contented client). We could've done better with more time, but both the deadline and the mounting cost caused us to stop. At our rate (Washington DC) of 90/hr, that would cost $1,980. However, the client (who doesn't necessarily know any better) feels that it should've taken less time or that we shouldn't charge as much. I'm curious to hear some of the details of how you long it would take you to work on a brochure. And how long it would take you to format graphs that display some fairly complex data (I'm of the opinion that a graph alone can take many many hours).

Any thoughts?

[Toon]

$90 an hour is more than fair for a brochure depending on how good the design was. Some clients don't realise that to buy licences for fonts and images can cost up to $300 for one job.
Basically hourly rate x time taken plus expenses should give a realistic result.
It would be interesting to see the design to tell you if I thought the time took is reasonable.

Best of luck

[jaredg27]

Thank you, Toon! I can't post the design in a public space, but I appreciate your feedback on this. It's so hard to know how long people spend designing things and what's competitive, etc. :-)