How Your Lifestyle Affects Your Illustration Rates
(Illustration by Gabe Lanza)
Have you ever noticed that you can’t get a straight answer about how much you should charge for a particular Illustration project? One factor that makes pricing such a vague topic is an Illustrator’s personal lifestyle.
As you know, the amount you charge for your Illustrations depends largely on how much you need to make in order to survive.
This means that you need to determine expenses such as rent, utilities, marketing and promotion, supplies, and many other costs of doing business.
One thing that is also important to factor into the equation is your own idea of a satisfied life.
What kind of life do you like to live?
Where are you located?
What level of comfort do you try to maintain?
What luxuries do you desire?
What does success mean to you?
The questions above, and many like it, can be helpful to consider when determining your monthly budget, and the answers can vary greatly from person to person. Furthermore, every artist’s unique lifestyle needs can push your rates either above or below industry standards.
For example, Person A might lead a simple life without much of a budget requirement for luxury or entertainment. Person B on the other hand may be the type of person who craves a lot of stimulation, likes to go to the movies, drink, eat out at expensive restaurants, drive expensive cars, and party like it’s 2095.
So, Person A will be able to get away with charging a much lower rate than Person B while maintaining their general standard of living.
Why is this important to consider?
It can be easy to get caught up in industry-standard rates when determining your price and forget the fact that everyone’s requirements are different. This is why it’s rare to ever get a clear answer from your peers about what you should charge for a given project.
Everyone has their own ideas about how much they’d like to make for their work, and what kind of life they’d like to live.
Naturally, this goes both ways, which means that when times are tough you may need to make adjustments to your standard of living in order to compensate. So, if you’re not bringing in a lot of new projects, you might need to tone things down and party like it’s 2011.
How does your lifestyle affect your rates? Or vice versa?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.
Special thanks to Gabe Lanza for providing the artwork for this post.
About Gabe Lanza: Gabe has had experience in editorial illustration, graphic arts, and product design including: apparel, branding and advertising. His passion lies in a strong graphic quality involving an eye for texture, pattern, and design. When he’s not locked in his studio, Gabe enjoys sipping a Whiskey Old-Fashioned, riding his vintage motorcycle, and playing board games with his wife, newborn son, and 26 pound cat.
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- What’s Wrong With Your Illustration Business?
- 9 Ways to Run a Smart Creative Business
- Dealing With Your Very First Illustration Client
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One of the best decisions I made getting started as a freelancer was to move here, to a university town, to hang with my grad student friends. I finished school recently enough that I’m used to living like a broke student, and surrounded by actual broke students, I don’t feel any pressure towards a more extravagant lifestyle. Makes it much easier to be frugal.
Thanks for your comment, Kim. Nothing like surrounding yourself with like-minded, or like-broke, people. Cheers.
This is the problem with setting, fair, equitable rates. Established illustrators trying to compete against youngsters just starting out, who are willing to lowball to get jobs, and they can do it because they’re living in their parents’ basements or sharing a 1-bedroom campus town rathole with 3 other similarly broke youngsters. I’m 54, I have a house in the middle of Chicago and two cars, and I don’t intend to live la vie boheme again. To that end I have a part-time job (not teaching, thankfully) to supplement my freelance work. Until I can support myself entirely with freelancing, as I did before the meltdown, this recession ain’t close to being over. And yes, I’m pissed.
Clients who choose an artist based only on low price are probably not the best ones to be targeting. They also tend to be the kind of client that doesn’t present work well, bother to build consensus or think about strategic rationales for the work. Generally, being inconsiderate, irresponsible and thinking only about immediate gain are characteristics of employees working for dead or dying brands.
Lowballing isn’t sustainable. Those who do it might one day find themselves working at a fast-food restaurant. It’s expensive to invest time and money in technological, conceptual and marketing over the long term. For those who do, all kinds of intelligence, skill, wisdom, efficiency and added value bake themselves into the work process naturally. Ultimately, this work will be effective in the marketplace in a holistic way.
I live in a city where a house costs close to a million dollars to buy. Not sure how that affects what a client will accept as far as pricing goes. Just because I want a million dollars isn’t good enough reasoning for charging even 1/100th of that for most jobs. The pricing should be appropriate to the situation, use and rights required.
Art is worth what you can get someone to pay for it. More so than with many other products. It makes picking the right price difficult.
I totally disagree that your ‘lifestyle’ should affect your illustration rates. The reason that resources like the Graphic Artists Guild handbook, and organizations like the AIGA exist is so that there is a rough standard for freelancers to adhere to. Undercutting your peers because you are willing to live on less is irresponsible. Following your rationale, every illustration student or those just out of school should be willing to work for nothing since they (in most, but not all cases) require less to get by. This sort of thinking puts working professionals at a constant disadvantage.
I totally agree with you Caitlin & Ben. I think what you have said works for basically all businesses. Let me give you an example. Granted these are generalizations but it pretty much went like this, I used to own a pizza shop in a different life. The customer who could pay the full price for the pizza never complained and tipped my drivers well, no problems. The customer who would only come in on $5 carry out day would compain 18 ways to Sunday about everything! Now that I am a fine art painter (& starting to license images) when I get people talking to me about a commission, I can tell in the first 5 minutes if they will problem customers or not. If they are I dont take the commission. Its about stepping over dollars to pick up nickles.
I have worked hard enough and long enough to set my own standards. Remember, you get what you pay for. We as artists need to keep that in mind and charge appropriately, because it works both ways. If you dont charge appropriately you are not just hurting yourself but your whole community of artists. A rising tide Lifts ALL Boats!
I too agree. As an artist starting out I did lots of research and found that having a set standard allowed me to price my work accordingly. I wasn’t a professional so I yes, I underbid the guidlines but I didn’t set myself too low. It helped me to know what people expected to pay for such work and allowed me not to be taken advantage of.
As my skills grew I charged more. I do have another “day Job” and perhaps one day I can make a full time living off of freelancing but for now I will work 14 hour days doing both because I love what I do and I do my best to educate clients and new artists alike about proper pricing and ethical conduct. Regardless of lifestyle.
I agree with Caitlin & Ben Weeks. A really great professor (Kathryn Adams) I had in school talked a bit about this issue, and explained it not in terms of cost per illustration, but in how many illustrations you want to do to maintain your lifestyle.
Let’s say someone has a goal of making 50k per year to maintain their quality of living. She explained it this way: Do you want to charge a fair industry standard price and do less illustrations or charge barely anything and have to make one illustration per day? Obviously it depends how many jobs you can get, but I really liked that way of putting it, it’s resonated with me a lot and totally eliminates the whole low-balling aspect of pricing.
If you low-ball your prices, it devalues the work of your fellow illustrators as well, and your competition isn’t the only one suffering – you will be too. IMHO it’s important to have pride in our work and respect for the industry and our peers. We all have a vested interest in making sure our industry is sustainable if we don’t want to be charging $5 per illustration. It’s about long-term sustainability vs short-term gains.
I’d have to disagree with Caitlin a little bit. The problem with standardised prices for freelancers is that people worldwide do indeed have different living situations and lifestyles, but the difference in price is usually made up for somewhere else.
For instance, in Australia, a freelancer living in Ballarat probably has a lower cost of living than I do here in Melbourne. But being in Melbourne I have a lot of local clients and I get to meet them in person, which is all part of the service. In the US, freelancers living in New York probably have a high cost of living compared to a lot of other towns, but my guess is that most of their clients would be local too.
I gues that’s more ‘geographical location’ than ‘lifestyle’. I could also be totally wrong about New York freelancers!
But I’ll agree with Caitlin that someone who charges $5 an illustration because they’re happy to live on 2 minute noodles and baked beans is a jerk! :)
But where do I find the list of rates/prices I should charge? Do I really have to buy that book about charging with ethic? Can’t a syndicate or a group publish a price list for all the most common commissions? :P