How long does it take to design a logo? Count the real hours

30 September 2026 · 6 min read

It depends less on the mark itself than on everything around it: the brief, the research, the sketches, the concepts you present, and the rounds of revisions after. Designers who quote a flat fee often find out the true hours only when a job goes badly. The better way is to measure one logo job from brief to final files, then price the next one from that.

Where the hours in a logo job go

A logo job looks like one task and is really several:

The brief: the first call, the questionnaire, reading what the client sent.
Research: the client’s market, how others in the field present themselves, the words the client kept using.
Sketching: often on paper, sometimes on a tablet.
Concepts: building the strongest ideas properly in your design app.
Presentation: mockups, and a short deck or PDF explaining each direction.
Revisions: the rounds after the client picks a direction, including the rounds you did not plan for.
Final files: every color version, every format, a simple usage sheet.
Messages: email and calls threaded through all of it.

The drawing is often not the biggest share. Revisions and messages are the parts that stretch, and they are the parts a flat quote tends to ignore.

Recording the desk side on your Mac

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set: the top five apps with the time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. You never start or stop anything, and it needs no macOS permissions to work.

On a logo day, expect your vector app, your layout or presentation app, your mail app and your browser on the receipt. Each line maps roughly to a stage: the vector app is concepts, revisions and final files; the presentation app is mockups and decks; mail is the back and forth.

If much of your research and client feedback happens in the browser, switch on “Itemize websites” in Settings. Browser time in the supported browsers then prints as the sites you used, each on its own line, competing with apps for the top five. A moodboard site, a stock image site and the client’s feedback tool become separate lines. Punchcard keeps only the site name, never the full address, the page title or what was on the page, so nothing about the client’s work ends up in the record. Private windows are never read, and sites under a minute stay on the browser’s own line.

Tracking never expires and the CSV export works without a license. The first two printed receipts are free; printing after that is a $9 one-time license.

The part the receipt cannot see

Two honest limits matter for designers.

Paper sketches happen away from the Mac. If you sketch in a notebook, that time is real work and it is not on any Mac record. Keep a note of each sketching session, start and end, and add it at the end of the job. Work that happens away from the Mac, and why the record misses it covers this in more detail.

There are no projects. Punchcard does not split time by client or job. If you design one logo while also working on a website for someone else, both live in the same vector app line. The simplest fix is to note, each day, roughly what share of the design time went to the logo. If the logo is the main job that week, the week roll is close to the logo’s cost on its own.

The CSV export helps if you want more precision. It has one row per session with start, end, app and seconds, so you can pick out the sessions you know were the logo and add them up.

Turning the hours into a price

When the final files are delivered, add it up:

Mac hours from the receipts or the CSV for the days you worked on the logo, adjusted for any other work those days.
Paper hours from your sketching notes.
Call hours that happened away from the Mac.

Divide the fee by the total. That is the effective hourly rate the job paid you, and it can be the most surprising number a designer sees all year. How to calculate your effective hourly rate on a fixed-price project walks through the arithmetic.

Then look at where the hours went. A few patterns are common:

Revisions are a large share. Put the number of included rounds in the quote, and price extra rounds separately.
Presentation takes longer than concepts. A reusable presentation template can shorten that stage a lot without lowering the quality.
Messages are a large share. A tighter brief at the start usually means fewer questions later.
Research is tiny. Not always a problem, but it can explain why the first concepts missed.

Do this for two or three jobs before changing your prices. One logo can be an outlier; three show you the shape of your own process. How to price art commissions from the hours they really take uses the same idea for illustration work.

What to write down for each job

A logo is easier to compare with the next one if you keep a short record alongside the hours. One line per job is enough:

The client type (a new business, a rebrand, a side project for a friend).
How many concepts you presented.
How many revision rounds happened, and how many you had quoted.
Total hours, and the rough split by stage.
The fee, and the effective hourly rate it worked out to.

After a handful of jobs, this line becomes the most useful pricing tool you have. When a new client asks for five concepts and unlimited revisions, you can see what that has cost you before, in hours rather than in feelings.

Questions

Does Punchcard record my file names or client names? No. Out of the box it records app names only: never window titles, document names, URLs, keystrokes or screen contents. With itemizing switched on it adds site names, and nothing more.

Can I show the receipt to a client? You can. Export it as a 1080x1350 PNG or copy it as plain text. It shows apps and totals, not project detail, so it works best as a picture of the effort rather than an itemized bill.

Does it count time on a drawing tablet? If the tablet is connected to the Mac and you draw in a Mac app, the time lands on that app’s line like any other. Drawing on a separate device is not recorded.