2011 Salary Trends

A new year and new prices are in full effect. With tax sea­son gear­ing up and the econ­omy slowly on the mend—or still in the toi­let depend­ing your point of view—it’s a good time to take one last look back at 2010 and see how well you fared and use what you learned to plan how you want to end 2011.

It might also be a good time to brush up on your stan­dards of pro­fes­sional prac­tice to bet­ter deal with the frus­tra­tions unique to freelancing.

Money, money, money.

While over­all prices are still down on aver­age from the highs in 2008, it is get­ting bet­ter. The great news for female design­ers: in 2010 the annual pay gap has dropped to just 30% what it was in 2008 to $1,612. While small com­pared to other indus­tries I’d like to think as cre­atives we are more pro­gres­sive and find this num­ber still too high. Lets see if 2011 can be the year we hit $0.

Your price should not be based on any one salary sur­vey, but rather on national trends, what the local mar­ket can bare, and some­times what an indi­vid­ual client is will­ing to pay. While there are many salary sites and sur­veys out there to base your rate on, the fol­low­ing are a few which are spe­cific to the cre­ative industry;

Cal­cu­lat­ing hours

The big ques­tion for many design­ers is wether to charge per project or per hour. I put together this post, Hourly vs Project , last year to tackle this very ques­tion. With so many design­ers mak­ing the jump to inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor after get­ting the boot from cushy in-house posi­tions it’s more impor­tant than ever to under­stand how to best charge for your ser­vice to cover all the hid­den costs. Whether hourly or per project, you’ll need a stan­dard unit by which to mea­sure projects by so you’ll know what to charge to hit your salary goal—what expenses have to be cov­ered, how to stay afloat if your ill, etc—and the fol­low­ing links ask these ques­tions to help you deter­mine your costs per hour.

So, until next year. Rinse. Repeat. YMMV.

Jeff designs print and web expe­ri­ences for a vari­ety of clients and enjoys shar­ing what he learns. He became a designer as the frac­ture between web and graphic design occurred and is now fas­ci­nated as the two dis­ci­plines are on the cusp of com­ing full-circle to merge into a new, media savvy gen­er­a­tion of design­ers. When not crazy busy, Jeff likes geo­caching and con­sum­ing copi­ous amounts of cof­fee. You should fol­low him on Twit­ter and Face­book. But not real life—that’s just creepy.