the Cost of Graphic Design Services

Toward the end of April I set up a contest at the local university to get someone to create a design for our company's new business cards. We set a two week deadline and offered $750 for whichever design we decided to go with, if any. We posted the winner on our company's website.

We actually got quite a few respondents. Some obviously half-assed and just thrown together, but a number seemed to show some exemplary design. We even went so far as to extend internship offers to a few of the students, though most of them had already found summer positions.

The award ended up going to an architecture student who not only sent us specifications down to paper composition and pantone colors for the inks, but thoughtful reasons why they should be used as well as a price schedule, all on top of a clean and compelling design. We contracted her to find a printer to do the work. The price for the cards ended up not only being much less than we expected, but a bit less than she predicted.

If she hadn't already had job offers, I would have hired her on the spot to do design work for our company.

If anyone has any concerns that today's youth are lazy with no job skills, it's not true. There are about as many layabouts today as there have always been. And I'm always surprised at the quality of work that people produce when pushed the right way. For a business card design, offering about half what I would have spent hiring a design firm, I got my choice among fifty designs or so all together, with about half of those being good enough to go immediately into production, and about three that were just stellar.