Pricing a limited font?

Tofu Type Foundry

Hi all! I’m looking for some advice for a possible commission I received. The client requires a custom typeface for a sports brand that will primarily be used on jerseys and team branding. The typeface is limited to English uppercase, lining figures, and some additional basic punctuation like /period and /hyphen.

This is my first commission request so I’m wondering how to calculate an estimate? I assume a single upfront fee is more preferred than charging an hourly rate? (with additional costs to incur if the scope increases.) It also seems reasonable that licensing cost would differ if exclusively/timed exclusively is not a factor—but how do you calculate that value?

John Hudson

Who will own the design? Does the client want to own it, or might they be content with a period of exclusive use? Do you think the design might have future value, e.g. if you were to adapt it to additional weights and styles, and more languages?

When calculating a total price, you should always price your labour and the rights separately. Calculate your labour as accurately as you can based on how much time you think the work will take, ensuring that you are earning a living wage. Estimate the value of the rights based on whether the client wants to own the fonts or whether you will retain rights and, if the latter, whether you think the design is something you will reasonably be able to benefit from financially in future.

Basically, the pricing of the rights will depend on what you are giving away to the client versus what you retain for yourself, but only if what you retain is actually worth something to you or to anyone other than this one client.

If the client wants to negotiate on the price, you only ever negotiate on the rights, never on the cost of the labour. So you can haggle over the pricing of the rights, or you can suggest different kinds of rights e.g. 3-year exclusive use, renewable for a later fee, rather than the client owning the rights, or you can negotiate a payment schedule to enable the client to pay over time for the rights. All that can be flexible. The important thing is that you are not doing the work for less than a living wage, and you are not giving away valuable rights for nothing.

harborb

@John Hudson pretty much covered the basics of the ideology. very well said. From my perspective most clients assume they will be getting full ownership so I veeeeeery rarely bring up licensing options and factor in full ownership into my original quotes.

 that character set is quite limited and especially bing only uppercase the characters are more simple and quicker to draw than lowers. if someone came to me with that brief It would take me a few days to design so I would charge like $3000. and have a strict timeline of a week. But that is just my own philosophy. I like to give the client super tight very strict timelines to limit useless arbitrary rounds of revision. 

Thomas Phinney

The other thing I want to mention is, my own experience is that I am VERY good at UNDERestimating the time something will take me, when it comes to type design. In fact, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of type designers underestimate the time/labor, but most especially people early in their careers.

BUT, you can compensate for this! When it comes to the part where you are estimating labor time, do what seems like a reasonable estimate, and then multiply by something else to make up for this. Double or 1.5 times are not crazy multipliers for this.

Similarly, set the hourly part of the estimate to something that you would be genuinely happy with, not merely ok.

This way, when things go to heck, either because of one’s own poor estimates, or errors, or the client being a nightmare, you are still not too badly off.