Graphic Design Inspiration

My boyfriend is designing a postcard for a medical billing company to send out to their clients. He has had a few years experience in school, but nothing professional. How much should he charge to design the postcard? We live in Florida, if that matters. There's a fabulous book out there called the Graphic Artist's Guild - Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. It comes out every year and is a great handbook for anyone in the design field. Not only does it have the rates that designers should charge for almost any industry, it also tells you about what practices are fair, unfair and illegal. It also gives you contracts that you can bring to clients so they give you a % of the job, even if they decide to cancel in the middle of the job.

It's got great resources like lawyers by state they help out artists that are getting screwed over by a company or person.

I probably sound like I work for the company, but seriously it's a great book to have on hand. Take the amount of hours he's planning on spending on it, add 20% more hours to be realistic. Take that and multiply by an hourly rate, I'd start with $85/hour. When he gets more experienced, he should move to 100/hr, then 150/hr for when he gets very good in a few years. This should be no less than $1,300 not including printing. Add in a budget for photography (stock or whatnot) and illustration if necessary -- use a good stock agency (like Veer), that's about $370 per photo. Build that into the estimate. Collecting stock photos will be important to the profession because of the relatively lax rules on using the royalty-free photos, he can use them on other projects and bill for usage. Stay away from the $1/photo sites, annoying as all hell when you start working with them on a detailed level.

If he estimates too much, as long as he keeps contact with the company, they will just tell him "no" or how much they can spend. Estimate too little and he will be stuck to be known as "the cheap designer" that will only get small jobs because he won't gain the respect a higher-priced designer commands. Well, it kind of depends on a lot of things...
1. Does your boyfriend need this for his portfolio? Who else has he done this for professionally??
2. How did he get this job? Does he actually have the job or is he putting in a bid?
3. Is it possible this could lead to more work with that company?
4. How important is this project to the company?
5. Can your boyfriend provide or provide access to mail merge and printing capabilities?
6. Do they plan on using this postcard over and over again or is it a one time thing. Do they want the "rights" to the design work?
7. Who is providing the artwork? Do they have a concept??
This all will affect the price he gives them and since I don't know the answers, I really can't give you a number. What I can tell you is that I work doing really basic graphic design at a company that mainly does printing and mail merging and we charge our clients $60 an hour for that service with a minimum of an hour. I would give the client you mention an estimate of $120 for a one time postcard that I kept the "rights" to, $240 for a postcard they would print at my company over and over again, and $360 for a postcard they could have the rights to (bring it anywhere and get it printed).