$2000 Bread & How to Find, Hire and Budget for Illustration & Design
There’s an old video somewhere on the internet (likely more than one) where they ask kids how much things cost. It turns out a car will run you somewhere between $5 and $5,000,000 dollars, while bread is at least two grand.
If you’ve never bought something before it is really dang hard to figure out how much it should cost. When it comes to graphic design and art you can maybe get a little closer by googling hourly wages and multiplying by how long you think your project will take… Now, ask five non-artists how long it took an artist to create a painting and their estimates will be as varied as kids and bread.
For a lot of us the problem is even more endemic – how do you go around finding illustrators and graphic designers in the first place. How do you know what is important to your project, how do you know what rights you should retain versus let go. I don’t have all of the answers, but will walk you through how we approach finding the right people, how we estimated our budget, what rights we think are important, and some random considerations, musings and pitfalls.
Finding the Right People
In another post I will go into detail about finding our illustrator and graphic designer. For now, I want to offer some high-level thoughts.
I think the adage of “you pay for what you get” is kind of a half-truth. You pay for surety of execution – or rather, by going through professional channels and working with established creators, you are going to pay a premium. That is a professional artist who has worked on board games before and executed well on them has a much higher probability of delivering what you need for your project. That isn’t to say that there aren’t great designers and illustrators fresh out of art school, or on facebook, or on a marketplace like fiverr. It just means that there is a lot more to wade through, a lot more uncertainty, and I would say a higher probability of not getting exactly what you need.
So how do you find the right people?
First you need to identify a pool of artists (illustrators and designers) whose work you are going to consider. There are a few ways to do this:
Ask around. Post on your social networks, ask families and friends, if you know an art or design professor ask them. It is always good to have an idea of your budget here, but there is a good chance that a friend of a friend will have a frank conversation with you about price. Going this route I was introduced to one promising graphic designer (who is ultimately not involved in the project), and was introduced to a number of artists.
Post on reddit, in facebook groups, on fiverr/upwork. My experience with these channels is that they were relatively lower quality than other routes I went. I don’t mean that there aren’t incredibly skilled artists on the platforms, just that there is a lot to wade through to find them, and I personally had a hard time finding someone who would be a good fit for the project.
Go to the source. If you are willing to compensate established artists well, then in my opinion this is the most surefire way to find the right people. Go on Board Game Geek and look up games with amazing graphic design or illustration. There is a credit section under each game, and a quick google search will often bring you to the artist’s webpage and contact information.
Once you find a pool of potential designers and illustrators, go through their portfolios. Think about what you style of illustration you want, what you value in design. Figure out who could be a good fit, who your dream partners are.
How to Reach Out
Randy Gallegos, an illustrator for Magic: The Gathering, and all-around phenomenal artist wrote a guide on how to reach out to an artist that far surpasses anything I could write here (link). If you haven’t contracted a large commission before (and likely even if you have), it is a must read.
My biggest takeaway is that I was approaching it all wrong. Back to kids and the price of bread, if you don’t know what is important, then you won’t know what to ask. Professionals want to work with professionals. They want surety that they will get paid, know that they will be treated professionally, and to know that they will be given clear parameters for the project needs.
Essentially don’t waste their time.
Have an idea of budget, know what your specific asks are, know any time constraints you have, and understand what rights are important to you as a game publisher and at what price.
Budget, Budget, Budget
Trying to find good answers to the budget question is pretty annoying from an outside perspective. Everything I could find online was vague, involving hand waving, and sage advice that you can have any two of: Value, Speed, Quality (but not all three) without actually telling me how to figure out what is value versus not value in the first place.
I am here to save the day. I can’t tell you what things will cost, or how much an individual artist will charge, but I can try and give you ballpark numbers so that when you are querying illustrators and designers you’ll at least get the time of day.
Illustrators: I am lucky to be relatively entrenched in some niches of the Magic: The Gathering community. I met Mike C. in a MTG art group (I own a couple of pieces of original magic art). Mike works with a talented group of fantasy artists (link). He not only gave me some excellent advice on navigating what terms are important in a contract, in defining the style that I am looking for, but also some explicit advice on rates.
First, keep in mind that artists will have different hourly rates in their heads. An artist that has yet to develop their skill will work for les than an established artist with consistent demand for their services. So, try and have some idea of where the person you are querying falls in their career, and adjust accordingly.
Per Mike (paraphrased): Artists typically have an hourly rate in their head, even though it isn’t how they quote projects. For professional level work you can expect to pay, at a minimum, ~$50/hr or about $400 a day. A lot goes into determining how long something will take – the level of detail, the size of the piece, how difficult elements are. For context though, a professional book cover will usually fall in the $1,000-$5,000 range. You can extrapolate from there, how large is your box art, how many card artworks do you need and in what level of detail.
This will get you a ball-park rate, but a lot will also depend on what you are asking for in the contract. Artists make money off of their back catalogues. They can re-use work, re-work it, re-purpose it. If you want exclusive rights for your work (meaning they can’t sell it again down the road) it can add 50% to the project cost. Conversely, if you want a discount by using re-packaged art, ask your favorite artists if they have a back catalogue.
Nut Hunt! is a little out of the ordinary in terms of our art requirements. The game board is modular consisting of 19 distinct tiles representing place names such as “The Willow Wallow,” “Frog Pond,” and “The Giant Toadstool.” We want distinct landscape artwork for each hex. In addition to that we want box art with squirrels, and a few ink drawings of nuts.
Because the hexes are a little unusual, it introduces a little more variability in our price range. Mike agreed that a reasonable starting budget is around $10k, and we can then talk to artists more about their thoughts on the project. The $10k number seems to be hitting about right and we are seeing quotes back on either side of our estimate.
We’ll likely end up commissioning some additional art down the road (margin art), but the current commission should cover most of the artwork.
Graphic Design: A lot of the same considerations apply to graphic design. The big differences in my (limited experience) is that some of the contractual considerations (licensing, exclusivity, etc), don’t seem to apply to graphic design. Graphic designers have also quoted me hourly rates with expected project cost, rather than a flat rate for the full project.
This makes sense functionally, as graphic design is less separable from the project, and is likely to have more iterating than a compositional piece.
So how much does it cost to hire a graphic designer for a board game? $4,000-$15,000 or more. Hourly rates can range from $40/hr for someone less established in their career to much closer to $100/hr for a seasoned veteran with a portfolio to show for it. The size and scope of your board game will be a big factor in your graphic design bill. And keep in mind that experience in board game design can help save you time and money down the road when it comes to formatting for manufacture.
Keep in mind that all of this reflects my experiences as of April 2021. If you are reading this in the future, make sure to account for inflation. Maybe bread really does run you two grand.
Resources
Jamey Stegmaier on finding artists: Link
Randy Gallegos on how to commission illustration: Link
Mike C. Artists: Link
