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How I went from charging $20 to $2000 for a logo design.
Here’s the unfiltered truth about my journey as a freelance designer.
I remember my first freelance gig like it was yesterday. I was in my final year of college, and just like any other student, all I wanted was to earn some extra cash. That’s when I got the opportunity to get paid for doing something I loved — designing.
Fast Forward half a decade, and I am still working as a freelance designer. The only difference?
I’ve gone from charging $20 for my first gig to now commanding top-dollar rates.
But this shift didn’t happen overnight.
It was a continuous process of trial and error. One that involved undervaluing my time to close the deals I wanted, to overcharging and losing potential long-term relationships.
And I wanted to share this journey with you. So stick with me till the end.
As a reluctant engineering student, graphic designing as a full-time job was always a distant dream. In 2016, concepts like the creator economy, gig economy, and freelancing weren’t as normalized as they are today. So I used to scribble reworked logos of existing brands at the back of my notebook during VLSI lectures thinking how cool it would be to do this for a living.
So when someone offered me $20 to do the same for his company, I jumped on board in less than a minute. From my internal logic, I already loved the work, so the payment I received was just gravy.
But I realized something was off when I did this for over 10 more projects.
I was putting all my efforts into the iterative creation process, yet my work wasn’t viewed through a lens of expertise. It was just viewed as a functional necessity to a business’s existence. As a result, it hampered my growth as a designer, as neither was I learning anything new nor was I given the liberty to think outside the box to develop creative solutions.
I knew something needed to change.
