Designers Charge for How Long Something Takes: The Misconception

But there’s a problem when time becomes the main way you judge the price of design. Because you’re not really paying for the number of hours a designer spends making your design.

You're paying for what they bring with those hours.

Think about it. If someone takes three days to solve a problem another person can solve in three hours, should you automatically pay more? Probably not, so why should a designer who can understand your problem, find the right direction and execute it efficiently be worth less simply because they didn't need as much time?

You’re not paying someone to move a mouse around for eight hours. You’re paying for their ability to look at a problem and know how to solve it and that includes years of learning what works and what doesn't. Knowing when an idea is worth pursuing and when it needs to be killed. Understanding, typography, hierarchy, color, composition, psychology, culture, audience and context.

And perhaps most importantly: judgment. Judgment especially is difficult to put on a timesheet.

A client may say, “Make the logo bigger.” A designer has to decide whether making it bigger actually improves the communication, or simply makes the design louder.

A client may say, “We need something more premium.” The designer has to figure out what premium means for that particular audience, category and business.

That is not production. That is problem-solving.

The question is would you rather pay for more hours or better decisions?

Now imagine two designers.

One gives you exactly what you asked for. while the other asks why you need it, challenges a few assumptions, notices something you hadn't considered and develops a solution around the actual business problem.

The second designer may spend fewer hours designing. But they may have spent years developing the judgment that allowed them to arrive at that solution and that's part of what you're paying for.

You're not paying someone to make a rectangle blue. You're paying for someone to know whether the rectangle should be blue in the first place.

And here's the part businesses sometimes overlook.

The invoice might be small but the consequences isn’t. If your identity makes your business look less credible than it is, that has a cost.

If customers can't tell what you offer, that has a cost. If your packaging gets ignored, that has a cost. If your communication keeps changing because there was never a clear system behind it, that has a cost.

The price of design is one thing. The cost of getting the problem wrong is another. That's why “How much does the design cost?” is only half the question.

The other half is: “What is this design supposed to do for my business?”

Does that mean every expensive design is valuable? No. And this is important. A higher price doesn't automatically mean better thinking. A designer charging more isn't automatically better, and calling something “strategic” doesn't make it strategic.

A good designer should be able to have that conversation with you. Because you shouldn't have to pay for mystery.

So where does time fit in? A project has deadlines. Research takes time. Concepts take time. Meetings take time. Production takes time. But time is not the whole value of the work.

If your designer becomes better and can solve your problem in half the time, that shouldn't mean you suddenly received half the value. In fact, it may mean you're benefiting from something you can't see and that is experience compressed into a decision.

That's the part clients rarely get to see. You see the final logo but you don't see every decision that led to it. You see the packaging but you don't see the thinking behind why it looks the way it does. You see the campaign but you don't see the problems that were avoided before it reached your audience.

And perhaps that's why judging design purely by time can be misleading because you're not buying a stopwatch. You're buying judgment.

So the next time you're comparing two design proposals, don't only ask:

“How many hours am I getting?” Ask: “What are those hours going to accomplish?”

Because the goal isn't to get more design. It's to get the right design doing the right job for your business. And sometimes, the most valuable part of the work is the part that never appears on the invoice.

At DjayStudio, we don't start with “What should we make?” We start with “What problem are we trying to solve with this?”

Then we build the visual solution around it.

If your brand has a problem that good design could solve, let's talk.