Budget for a design project

If you are freelance or they ask you audiovisual of a new service and you don't know where to start, in this post we help you make a budget that suits each project.

In design projects it is difficult economically value our work. We can break down our work into different categories, and in this way, calculate the price.

A good way to value our work is decide our hourly price, that is, how much we charge per hour performed. This allows us to apply a price to each service calculating the time we invest in it. For example, if we charge ten euros an hour and they ask us for a contact card, assuming that in eight hours we can design them, our price will be 80 euros.

Internal planning document

To plan effectively we will carry out a internal document, that is, it will not be visible to the client. It will help us to organize ourselves and later we will make a document for the client summarizing all the points.

In this internal document we can break down the following points:

• Description of the project and the client: In this section we must write all the data of interest, such as a description, delivery dates, language / s that we will use, etc.
• Description of the activities, tasks and hours of dedication: The issues to be discussed in this section could be meetings, research and study of the context. Also the development of the concept (moodboard, brainstorming), management (contact with the client, making the budget). We will add more points depending on the need of each project.
• Description of the extra costs: When we carry out a design project we must take into account costs that may arise in its development, such as changes in the client, travel in the event that the meeting is outside our territory, etc.
• Description of issues to pay attention to, above all, if we work with third parties, and therefore, we must have good coordination.
• Justification of decisions.
• Gantt diagram: it is a visual tool to organize the tasks and the planned time that we will dedicate to each of them. To understand this concept, we can imagine a calendar in which we mark the days in different colors according to the task to be carried out.

External document

The economic offer that we will show the client will summarize all the previous points. We should not show them all, we advise grouping them.

In this budget we can add the following points:

• Breakdown of the different design materials.
• Budget of print.
• Budget of extra material.
• Terms of payment.