The story goes something like this (and is subject to the rules of Chinese Whispers, but the idea remains the same):
Pablo Picasso is dining at a restaurant when a passer by recognizes him and asks the artist for a favor: a quick sketch. The aging Picasso finds some paper and a pencil and spends a few minutes drawing something to please his fan. He hands over the finished piece and says ‘That will be $10,000 please’. The passer-by, stunned by the high price tag exclaims ‘But it only took you five minutes’, to which the painter replied ‘No, it took me 25 years’.
While not all graphic design jobs can be undertaken in just a couple of minutes (most jobs will take a lot longer than expected or often budgeted for), it is not necessarily the time you are paying for, but the expertise. Pablo Picasso had spent many years honing his craft, making mistakes and discovering what worked and what didn’t. Graphic designers too spend many years, that you will not have seen, in training and developing skills.
The flip side to this story is that many jobs require much more time than expected. Design is not an event, but a process. To correctly create a commercial piece (print design, web design, multimedia, etc) requires research, time and space. Research of the customer’s field or industry; time to work through all the wrong answers and ill fitting solutions; and space to process the research and other data to produce something truly creative.
Most graphic designers charge a little less than $120,000 an hour, but they will still have many years of experience that they will put to work for you and your business.