one... million... dollars.

There have been numerous threads on Typophile regarding pricing. You should check the archives

For the bold to be completed in 4 weeks you essentially have to complete the whole thing in 4 weeks, so that 8 week deadline is really meaningless, and 4 weeks is a short deadline for a full character set.

What I usually do for custom projects is charge a price per unique character and then charge a flat fee for adapting to bold and italic and other variations.

As a ballpark the price per character should be based on the time it would take you to do a character and how much you think your time is worth. The more complex and difficult the character forms are the more time it takes and the more you charge.

Figuring a base price per hour of $60, if each character takes 15 minutes you might charge $15 per character. You'd charge less for the accented characters, maybe 1/4 as much. Maybe a little less for punctuation.

So with a relatively easy font at $15 a character you'd be charging maybe $1200 plus another $200 for the accented characters and $200 each for the different styles (bold, italic, etc). As market prices go that's pretty cheap. I would actually value my time at higher than $60 an hour, so I doubt I'd ever charge this little, but it's a starting point.

I also discount or increase the price based on the source material I have to work with. If the customer provides full high quality drawings of the characters I charge less. If they just give me a rough idea I charge more.

Another consideration would be the time. 4 weeks isn't a lot. I'd jack the price of 25% for that kind of time deadline.

Dave Nalle
Scriptorium Fonts