Six ways to start · weeks, people, fee
What a week costs, and how many of them there are.
Every figure below is a real number from a real job, not a bracket. Add VAT at 22%. Print, photography and translation are billed at cost with the invoices attached.
Four hundred sheets of 120gsm waiting for the guillotine · Grafiche Noventa, Padua, October 2025
The ledger
The same four fields as every project sheet, plus the one a client actually asks about first. Durations are kick-off to handover. People are everyone who bills an hour, including the bookkeeper.
We invoice 40% at kick-off, 30% at the midpoint, 30% at handover, thirty days net. Nothing starts before the first one clears. Three clients in nine years have paid late enough that we stopped; all three are still clients.
What a week is
Nine weeks is nine weeks of somebody's hands.
A week on a Fermo Nove job is roughly twenty-eight billed hours across the people on it, not one person for forty. The nine-week bakery job was three people at nine, eleven and eight hours a week, plus two days of press attendance nobody can do from a desk.
We do not run two full jobs at once per designer. That is why the next open slot is usually eleven weeks out and why, twice, we have told a client to go somewhere faster.
- Billed week≈ 28 hours across the team
- Hourly, out of scope€125 design · €160 direction
- Press day€780 plus travel, Veneto
- Next open slot11 weeks from enquiry
- Rush surcharge60%, and we usually say no
- Jobs at onceOne full job per designer
Edge of a 400-page block, uncut · the texture a PDF cannot show a client
What we refuse
Six things clients ask for that we will not do, written down so nobody wastes a meeting on them.
Agnese Brolo, partner
Will you pitch for it?
No. Not paid, not unpaid, not "just a direction to see the thinking". We will come and talk for ninety minutes for nothing, bring three projects that are near yours, and tell you what we would charge. That is the whole free part.
Can we see three routes?
One route and the argument for it. Three routes means two we do not believe in, and the one you pick will be the one that photographs best in a boardroom rather than the one that works on a van at six in the morning. If the single route is wrong we go again at our cost — it has happened eleven times in thirty-four jobs.
Can you start next week?
Almost never. The slot is eleven weeks out on average and we will tell you the real date in the first reply. We have taken two rush jobs since 2016 at a 45% surcharge and regretted one of them, so the surcharge is now 60% and we say no more often.
Do you do websites?
We design them and we do not build them. There are two studios in Vicenza and one in Treviso we hand the files to, and we will introduce you rather than mark up their invoice. The design of a site sits inside the identity fee; the build does not.
Can the fee come down if we cut the scope?
Yes, and it should. The fee is weeks multiplied by people, so cutting a deliverable cuts weeks and the number moves. What does not move is the reading fortnight at the start — that is where the job is won, and a client who cuts it gets a worse answer eleven weeks later.
Who owns the work?
You do, in full, from the day the last invoice clears — artwork, fonts licensed in your name, working files, everything. We keep the right to photograph it and put the sheet on the wall. If you need that withheld for a period, say so at kick-off and it goes in the contract at no cost.
Pick a row and tell us your date.
Name the engagement, the year it has to be out and who signs it off. We will reply with a real start week and a figure you can take to a board, usually inside two working days.