There is a "friend of a friend" who wants me to design a simple brochure for his landscape business using Microsoft Word. I will only need to provide him with one copy, as he is going to use a local printing shop to print a large volume of copies. My question is... about how much should I charge? It will only take me one or two approximately 1 hour sittings to design what he wants.

I've never done anything like this for pay before, he just found out that I know how to do such things and I agreed to do it. So if anyone has a general idea of what such a design service would cost through an actual business, please give me some advice.

Thanks!

A lot depends on the size of the company and the complexity of the job. I've done translations for international companies who didn't blink twice at $150/hr for many hours work. Small local places were looking for something in the area of $10. I'd ask for a flat fee of at least $50, and negotiate from there. If he were to hire a PR business he'd pay quite a bit more.

For home work, I usually charge $20 per hour, or I set a flat fee before beginning the job. If I estimate the job at 2 hours, I would probably ask for $50 on the premise that it will likely exceed my time estimate.

Do you have MS Publisher? This is software designed to create brochures.
Publisher
MS has some downloads available for Publisher to help prepare the finished document to be sent to the print shop. Look in the Publisher downloads section.

Also, if you're not aware, there are many versions of MS Word, and a document created in your computer at home may not look very good when opened in another computer. For that reason, it is a good idea to print the document into .pdf format so that the printer will print what you see on your screen. By "print to .pdf", I don't mean to print on a printer, but rather to print to a .pdf file. You then send the file to the print shop. You can download a free .pdf printer at pdf995

Dwight

Ok, thanks for the suggestions guys!

Dwight: I don't have MS Publisher, but we agreed that I will design the brochure using MS Word and print one final copy... then he will go to a copy shop to do the large volume printing. So I don't have to worry about having different versions of Word. Thanks so much for the information about printing into .pdf though! I will definitely try that out in the future.