How long is a piece of string?
amanda j (35 points) | Fri, 2007-11-23 13:02I have been asked to quote for the design of a 28 page brochure/magazine for a real estate agent that will have listings, articles and advertisers. It has to work with their branding but be different from existing publications that they do for other areas.
I have quoted 30 - 40 hours for the layout design to cover intial ideas and client revisions (dealing with client here in Spain but has to also go through head office in the UK). Do I work too slow or is this, at a guesstimate, about right?
The client was quite supprised it would take that long. I based it on the fact that I put together a 96pp magazine every month and it takes me two weeks hard graft with an existing template.
Cheers
It's a good starting quote - and maybe you'll be surprised and finish it faster than that - depending on how good they are as a client in getting you the editioral content, photos, images, etc.
I've done a 72pg layout before, though, in about 30-40 hours, as well, but the most time-consuming part of that was just flowing the editioral content. Actual layout design was kind of minimal.
Real estate agents have a tendency to give you poorly written and mispelled copy, lousy photos, TIFF images for logos instead of EPS, etc. And they always come in late with this stuff, or have last-minute changes that often require revamping a whole page's layout, and maybe others as well, depending on the size of ad they settle on. If that's going to be an issue for you in this layout, I'd advice you to pad your estimate to accommodate this kind of thing.
Mara