The Calligrapher's Business Handbook

Pricing & Policies for Lettering Artists

Molly Suber Thorpe

• Publisher: Calligrafile Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780692879283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Técnicas artísticas

The Calligrapher’s Business Handbook is a guide to best business practices and pricing strategies for calligraphers and lettering artists. Whether you’re starting out in creative freelancing, transitioning from a different profession, or running a lettering business that just needs a boost, you will welcome the invaluable ideas in this handbook. Award-winning graphic designer, renowned calligrapher, and bestselling author of Modern Calligraphy, Molly Suber Thorpe shares her hard-earned insights to answer your most pressing business questions.

Molly has packed these pages with advice you won’t find anywhere else, covering a range of topics for freelance calligraphers and hand lettering artists:

• How professional calligraphers charge for their services
• Whether to charge flat rates or hourly rates
• When – and how – to offer discounts or freebies
• How to charge for commercial work, such as logo designs
• How to get the most bang for your advertising budget
• What goes into a fair project contract
• How to navigate copyright licensing and know your rights!

Chapter One:
Calligraphy & Commerce

During my career as a professional calligrapher and freelance graphic designer, I have taught calligraphy to hundreds of students and worked with countless peers in the lettering arts industry. There is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the business of calligraphy and hand lettering and, over the years, I’ve heard the same questions and run into the same misconceptions time and again. My goal in writing this book is to provide answers to these questions and to clarify misconceptions about the business side of hand lettering by creating a guide to the best practices and pricing strategies of successful, professional lettering artists. Common questions include:

• What prices do professional calligraphers charge for their services?
• When should I charge a flat rate and when should I charge by the hour?
• I’ve heard I should charge a lot more to design a logo than to design something for an individual to use personally, but why?
• What is the protocol when a company wants to buy the copyright to my work? (Wait, do I even own the copyright to my work if a client hired me to make it?)
• What are exclusive rights? How are nonexclusive rights different?
• What should a fair project contract include?
• When, if ever, should I agree to do work for free or for considerably less than my customary rates?
• What are the best ways to advertise on a budget, especially when I’m just starting out as a freelancer?
• Do I need to go to art or design school to become a successful, in-demand lettering artist?

Within these pages you will find detailed answers to these and many other questions that you won’t find elsewhere, specifically targeted to freelance lettering artists.

Study, dedicated practice, and refined skill are simply not enough to succeed as a competitive freelance lettering artist in today’s market. I give you actual, recommended rates for the most common lettering projects, help you lay the groundwork for a successful freelance company, outline the best practices and policies for working with clients, give tips for contract negotiations, and share my own learning experiences – good and bad – as a professional, freelance calligrapher. In short, I will help you launch and grow your lettering or calligraphy career, whether you’re a beginner straight out of school or transitioning from a different profession, or you already have a business that needs a boost.

The desire among the hand lettering community for professional standards and unified best practices is growing as fast as the community itself, and a unified artist community benefits all of us who work within it. Thus, my second goal for this book is to inspire others in our field to speak transparently about how we price our work and establish our business practices, in the hope that we can encourage one another to set fair, competitive rates that fairly align with our talents. I do not suggest that we become open books about everything we do – your secret recipe for the best lilac ink or the tools you use to create your signature style are your own trade secrets and are what make your work unique. But when it comes to the business side of our work, including our rates and policies, I cannot think of a single good reason why sharing the basic principles that make us successful entrepreneurs will diminish us professionally. In fact, I can only see that it will strengthen a respect for our entire profession, as well as the reputations and sense of fulfillment of the individual artists within it.

Calligraphy’s Role in Design

Since the time letters were first styled into artwork, signage, and advertisements, lettering and commerce have been inextricably linked. Indeed, hand lettering has existed as an occupation for millennia, but in recent years the field has witnessed an unprecedented rate of growth. Calligraphers played a vital role in design and communication before computers and the advent of digital type, before printed layouts were mocked up with X-acto® blades, before Shakespeare’s creatively-lettered playbills dotted the streets of London, before Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized the transmission of the written word, before monks slaved over the gold-encrusted letterforms of illuminated manuscripts, before Chinese scrolls were adorned with dynamic glyphs representing movement as much as words. Even after the invention of the printing press, hand lettering was still the only way to create typography that could not be rendered from wood blocks and moveable metal type. Although we are now well into the digital era and those with access to the internet have literally tens of thousands of fonts at their fingertips, hand lettering and calligraphy are more fashionable and sought-after than they have been since the pre-computer era. Its role and significance may have changed dramatically with time, but hand-crafted typography remains a crucial design component, and, in turn, an integral feature in creative commerce as artwork commissioned for personal and commercial uses.

Despite the recent surge in calligraphers opening shop, and the profession proving to be an increasingly lucrative one, many questions about the business side of hand lettering remain unanswered in books, blogs, and social media. This is especially true now that there is such tremendous overlap between the fine art of calligraphy and the commercial work of graphic design. The intersection of these two fields has resulted in an exponential increase in the demand for lettering artists who can create digitized designs for advertisements and retail products. Many letterers are finding that they must hastily familiarize themselves with the graphic design industry in order to remain competitive with their peers for commercial jobs. In the chapters that follow, I will teach you how to navigate the industries of lettering arts and graphic design so that you can build a successful, lucrative career as a freelance lettering artist. I will build a bridge between the graphic design and lettering industries, highlighting the key business principles of freelance graphic designers that also pertain to the business models of hand lettering artists.

My Story: From Design Student to Creative Entrepreneur

As a college sophomore, I became editor-in-chief of my university’s literary magazine. When I realized quite early on that choosing fonts and designing the covers was my favorite part of the job, it dawned on me that graphic design could be a career, not just a hobby. Soon I found myself balancing full-time classes in the Design Communication Arts program at The University of California, Los Angeles, and managing a Hollywood art gallery. My studies focused on typography and layout, and I was happily on track toward a traditional, computer-based graphic design career. When a new class in Italic Calligraphy appeared in the course catalogue, I leapt at the chance to take it.

Toying with letterforms, admiring vintage typography, and taking pride in my personal handwriting had always been among my passions, so unsurprisingly, I was instantly hooked on this new craft. Its balance of creativity and perfectionism enthralled me. Filling page upon page with repetitive letter drills was deeply meditative, but pretty soon I was itching to explore flourished, script styles. My wonderful Italic teacher, Carrie Imai, set me up with the right supplies to learn pointed pen calligraphy, and with a little of her guidance, I experimented on my own. I spent hours copying letterforms from type specimen books and writing out favorite poems to practice layouts. I bought a second desk and squeezed it into an empty corner of my very small apartment. This was my escape from the computer screen, and I began spending most of my free time there, practicing calligraphy late into the nights.

Early on, I became particularly interested in creating informal, modern alphabets inspired by – but still quite different from – the old-fashioned script styles I saw in books. I loved pushing letterforms right up to the edge, just before sacrificing their legibility. Finding resources to learn these experimental, modern styles that most interested me, and create unique ones of my own, was a struggle. Photo sharing social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest didn’t exist yet, nor were there books or blogs dedicated solely to modern calligraphic script styles. (This was actually the driving force behind writing my first book, Modern Calligraphy – I wanted to create the resource for other hobbyist calligraphers that I wish I had had back then.) Eventually I found a handful of other modern calligraphers’ websites. I connected with these calligraphers and we shared stories, tips, and tricks, forming a small but invaluable coterie via email.

I joined the Society for Calligraphy of Southern California, which provided me with a much-needed community beyond my inbox. As a newbie to the calligraphy “scene” who had spent a lot of time learning in the seclusion of my studio apartment, it was nothing short of bliss to sit at a table of calligraphers and chat about nib flexibility and ergonomic pen holders. I took workshops from the guild’s lettering artists and was exposed to new styles and techniques. Meanwhile, I was collecting a library of books for inspiration, from exemplars of ornate Victorian letterforms to midcentury sign painting. Modern, pointed pen script remained the most meaningful to me, though, but now I was able to narrow my focus on it with more purpose than before.

By the time I graduated from UCLA, I was working at a graphic design firm in Santa Monica, California, doing computer-based layout and branding work. This experience not only enriched my design skills and honed my aesthetic, but it taught me the nitty-gritty, industry standard practices of running a graphic design business. I learned to write contracts, manage my time when working on complex projects, and deal with troublesome clients.

Perhaps most important, the experience made me realize that my lettering skills had commercial potential, and that I could make a business doing what I really loved. Like every other talent that requires training and practice to master, my calligraphy was a commodity that could be sold or traded. I loved what I was doing (and still do!) but occasionally that passion brought with it the odd side-effect of making me question whether I could justify charging a living wage for it. When I was working at the graphic design firm, I didn’t need to set my own rate, so any insecurities I may have felt did not impact my income. When I became a freelancer, though, I had to put a price tag on my own talents.

While working on computer graphics by day, I simultaneously founded Plurabelle Calligraphy (from my mother’s middle name, for those who often wonder). I printed a small batch of business cards and launched a bare bones website with a sampling of my work. At that point I had no idea that Plurabelle would expand beyond a side project or hobby – I was a professional graphic designer, not a professional calligrapher, after all. Nonetheless, I made packets of calligraphy samples and on the weekends I dropped them off with stationery shops and event planners around Los Angeles. If I found myself in a café that I thought could use some help with their menu boards, I introduced myself to the manager. If a friend was getting married, I offered to do the calligraphy at a friendly price. Within a year, my “side project” was picking up steam and I was getting envelope addressing jobs from local stationers. Another year passed and Plurabelle Calligraphy had grown even further, merging wit...