The Designer's Guide To Money

Just how much should you be paid? Tom May asks a range of creatives how they handle the tricky issue of costing, gleaning tips for getting paid appropriately for your design work.

- Tom May

For most of us, working in a creative discipline is not primarily about the money. It’s more of a calling, a need to express yourself creatively, while being passionate about creating great work. Unfortunately, when the landlord is banging on the door for this month’s rent and the bills are mounting up, none of that is much help.

The good news is that on the whole, design is a relatively well paid profession, and it should be able to sustain you financially as much as it does emotionally. But there’s a skill to extracting the right value for your services, whether you’re negotiating your salary, setting your freelance rates or pricing up projects at studio level.

To help you get it right, we explore these three areas, and also get some expert advice on how to get the maximum value for your work.

INCREASE YOUR SALARY

Negotiating a salary is hard enough for any professional, says Ted Leonhardt, a seasoned designer and author of Nail It: Stories for Designers on Negotiating with Confidence. But it’s especially difficult for creatives.

Why? “The biggest problem is that creatives by their very nature are more empathetic than the general population,” he points out. “Indeed, our ability to create work that connects with people relies on this empathetic sense that we have. So if you’re trained as a creative, you give in to the vulnerabilities that you feel about your work, and end up undervaluing your monetary value.”

So what’s a designer to do? “The first, and most important step is awareness: to understand that this is completely normal,” says Leonhardt. “Then step two is to harness this ability to be empathetic to read the emotions of the people you’re negotiating with, and use it in your favour.”