Graphic design proposal template with three priced options.

A graphic design proposal should restate the client's problem in their own words, say what you'll make and how many concept routes and revision rounds that includes, set the dates and the one person who approves, and price the work in lines a client can read one at a time. If you offer two or three options, build each one out of the same priced lines, so a client who picks the middle option and later wants one piece of the bigger one can buy that piece at the price already printed. The version below is filled in for Larkin Street Playhouse, a 280-seat theater in Providence, Rhode Island, and you can copy it or take it as a Word file or PDF.

What should a graphic design proposal include?

Enough for the client to choose an agency and an option in one sitting, which means the reasoning, the dates and the person who decides, plus a price broken into lines small enough that any one of them could be bought on its own later.

PandaDoc's freelance graphic design proposal template runs through credentials, testimonials, selected work, a project summary, a high-level scope, a delivery timeline, pricing and a signature, and its timeline says the proposal includes 3 client-requested revisions without saying what a fourth would cost. Proposify's graphic design template sets out nine sections from the cover through goals, process, timeline and investment to sign-off, and describes a project typically spanning 8 weeks without putting a fee, a revision count or a payment schedule anywhere in it. Hannah Bacon's article is the most practical of the three, built around a return brief, a moodboard, a list of what she'll make with its quote, a timeline, the design process and how to book, with a 50/50 deposit and final payment as its example and a note that she sometimes offers two or three package options.

That last idea is where most design proposals end up, and it's a good one, because a client looking at three options is deciding which one rather than whether. What the packages we read don't show is what any single piece inside a package costs, which leaves the whole package as the only thing a client can buy. The version below keeps the three options and prints the priced line underneath every one of them.

Why build every option from the same priced lines?

Because the request that turns up halfway through a design project is usually one piece of an option the client turned down, and a package price has no way of selling one piece of itself.

Larkin Street's Option C adds three things to Option B: a renewal mailer at $1,450, six ad sizes at $210 each and the layered working files at $1,600. Written as a single figure, "$19,060, everything in B plus subscriber materials", it leaves the agency three poor answers when the theater asks for just the mailer in January. It can tell the client to upgrade for $4,310, which reads as a penalty for asking. It can invent a mailer price on the spot, which the client then weighs against a memory of the whole brochure costing about the same. Or it can quietly make the mailer, which is how most of these requests end. With section 5 in the proposal there's a fourth answer, and it's the line that was already there.

The lines help before signing as well. A client reading the step from B to C can see that open files make up $1,600 of it, and a theater with no in-house designer can decline that line without feeling the bigger option was padded. If you want the top option to carry a discount, write the discount as its own line, minus $600 for instance, rather than shaving a little off each price, because shaved prices quietly become your rates and make the smaller options look overpriced beside them.

How many options should a graphic design proposal offer?

Three is the usual number and a sensible one, as long as each option adds whole lines to the one below it instead of swapping pieces around, so every option is a smaller or larger version of the same project.

Option A should be the smallest version that still solves the client's problem, never a straw man built to be rejected, because some clients will pick it and you'll have to deliver it proudly. At Larkin Street that's one season look, the brochure, six posters and the program cover for $9,850, which fixes the complaint in 1.2 on its own. Option B is what you'd actually recommend, here with a second route for the concept review, lobby banners and the social kit at $14,750. Option C adds the things the client mentioned on the first call without committing to, which is where the renewal mailer came from, and on an identity project it's where the answers to a branding questionnaire about every place the logo has to appear usually point.

The nesting matters more than the number. If Option B dropped the program cover to make room for the banners, a client who chose B and later wanted program covers would be asking for something from A, and nobody would know whether that was an upgrade, a downgrade or a favor. When each option contains the one below it, any later request sits in exactly one place on the page. It's the same reason a web design proposal with a printed rate card lists its additions while the client is still choosing rather than after.

What do routes, rounds and working files cost in a proposal?

Each gets its own line, so the client can see exactly what a bigger option buys: one concept route with two revision rounds is $3,400 here, a second route is $2,300, a round beyond the two is $520 and the layered files are $1,600.

Routes and rounds are where design projects leak money, because a request to see another direction sounds like part of the job rather than extra work. Printing the second route as line 4.5 means the client who chooses Option A has knowingly bought one route, and the full wording on what counts as a round belongs in a graphic design contract that prices each extra route, which is where the definitions go once an option is accepted.

Working files deserve the same treatment. Hannah Bacon's article suggests listing the file formats a client receives, and the proposal above does that for every option, since each includes print-ready PDFs and image files. The layered originals are different, because handing them over means the theater's own coordinator can make next spring's gala poster in the season look, and that's worth pricing openly rather than refusing or giving away. Section 7 does the same for decisions, naming the managing director as the one person who chooses and approves, with board comments arriving through her as one reply within three business days.

What happened when Larkin Street wanted part of Option C?

The theater bought the mailer and four ad sizes from Option C for $2,290 under section 5, the managing director approved it the next morning, and the print date didn't move.

Larkin Street accepted Option B on Friday, November 20, for $14,750, and paid the $7,375 deposit under 8.1. Both routes went up on the wall on December 18, the board chose the second one, and the brochure and posters were in their first round of changes by early January. On Monday, January 11, 2027, with subscription renewals running behind, the board chair asked for a renewal mailer, and the marketing manager added four ad sizes for the Providence newspaper and a regional arts calendar.

The agency replied the same afternoon with two lines from the proposal: the mailer at $1,450 under 4.8 and four ad sizes at $210 each under 4.9, $840, for $2,290 in total. Because the request landed before the January 15 date in 6.4, the mailer joined the brochure's print run on February 12 without a new schedule. The managing director approved on January 12, the project total moved to $17,040, and the final invoice became $7,375 plus $2,290, or $9,665.

Upgrading to Option C would have cost $19,060, which is $2,020 more for two ad sizes and a set of working files nobody had asked for. The managing director didn't have to take a $4,310 upgrade to the board, and the agency didn't have to price a mailer from scratch for a client who knew what the whole brochure had cost. That's scope creep handled with a price the client already had, which is the cheapest way it can be handled.

How long should a graphic design proposal stay open?

Thirty days for the option prices is reasonable, and the line prices in section 4 should hold until final files, because those are the prices a client actually uses after signing.

Larkin Street's proposal was issued on November 2 and valid until December 2, which gave the board one meeting to choose and kept the December 7 start realistic. A proposal accepted after that date gets repriced before anyone starts, for the same reason a quote with a start-by date holds a price for a stated stretch of months rather than forever. The line prices are a different promise, made for the length of the project, and section 5.1 says so in as many words.

Keep the priced part short, around two pages, and put the portfolio and testimonials in front of it as separate pages so the client can skip back to them. The pricing page of a proposal is a quote whether or not you call it one, which is the point the difference between a quote and a proposal comes down to, so write it in the plain register of a quote even when the pages before it are selling.

A package price is a discount, and the lines are the price list

If you copy one sentence from the proposal above, make it 5.1: any line in section 4 that isn't in the option you choose can be added at the price shown, at any point before final files, without moving to a bigger option. At Larkin Street that sentence turned a $4,310 upgrade nobody wanted into a $2,290 addition approved overnight, and it cost nothing to write in November.

The proposal sets the price, and the record of the yes is the part that still has to happen in January. Docket is where that January request lands: the agency enters the price from the line the client already accepted, sends it to the one approver named in section 7, and her approval is kept with its date, so the final invoice matches what was agreed.

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