What a full set of marketing materials costs to design in Dubai

Designing a complete set of marketing materials in Dubai means paying for eight to ten separate pieces, and the market only publishes prices for three of them. The public reference points: a brochure runs AED 800 to AED 3,500 with a mid-market agency and AED 1,500 to AED 15,000 across the wider market, a company profile starts around AED 2,000, and a sales presentation lands anywhere from AED 2,000 to AED 75,000. Printing is a separate bill. An Arabic version adds 50% to 80% on top of the design fee.

Every founder who calls us asks for "a brochure." Then the licence arrives, the first trade show gets booked, the landlord asks for a signage drawing, and the brochure turns out to be one file out of nine. Nobody in Dubai publishes the price of the whole set, because printers quote print, design studios quote design, and the signage company quotes a permit job. So here is the set, piece by piece, with the numbers that are actually published and an honest note where they are not.

All figures below are market reference points gathered from published Dubai price pages at the time of writing. Your quote moves with page count, print run, and who does the work.

What a full set of marketing materials actually contains

A full set of marketing materials in the UAE is the artwork a company needs to open its doors, walk into a meeting, and stand in a hall at a trade show. Nine pieces cover almost every business we onboard.

Piece	What it does	Files you should receive
Business card	The one item you will reprint most often	Print-ready PDF with bleed, both language versions
Letterhead and email signature	Quotes, contracts, invoices	Editable Word or Docs template, plus HTML signature
Company profile	The document procurement asks for before they shortlist you	Print PDF and a lighter screen PDF
Brochure or leaflet	Handouts, mailers, reception counter	Print PDF with imposition, editable source
Sales presentation or pitch deck	Meetings and investor rooms	Editable slides in your team's software, not flattened images
Roll-up banner and exhibition graphics	GITEX, Gulfood, and every hall in between	Large-format artwork at correct scale
Social media templates	Weekly posting without a designer on call	Editable templates, not flat exports
Packaging, labels, or delivery inserts	Retail and e-commerce brands only	Dielines matched to your supplier
Shopfront or vehicle signage artwork	Physical visibility, subject to approval	Scaled artwork the signage contractor can file

Skip what you do not need. A B2B consultancy with no retail presence has no use for dielines. An e-commerce brand with no showroom has no use for signage artwork. The set is a menu, and the fastest way to overspend is to order all nine because a proposal listed all nine.

Definition for quick reference. Marketing materials design in Dubai is the production of a company's branded print and digital assets, from the business card to the exhibition banner, built from an existing brand identity rather than replacing it. If you do not yet have that identity, the collateral is the second project, not the first. Our breakdown of what a branding agency in Dubai charges covers the first one.

What each piece costs to design

Three items in the marketing materials set have published prices in Dubai. The rest get quoted inside a package, and any agency claiming a fixed rate for a roll-up banner is quoting a template.

Item	Published design price signal (AED)
Brochure or leaflet, mid-market agency	800 to 3,500
Brochure, across the market including premium studios	1,500 to 15,000
Company profile	from 2,000
Sales presentation or pitch deck	2,000 to 75,000
Arabic version of a printed piece	+50% to 80%, or 300 to 600 per spread
Cards, letterhead, folders, roll-ups, social templates, signage artwork	No published rates; priced inside the package

The brochure spread tells you most of what you need to know about this market. The gap between AED 1,500 and AED 15,000 is not craftsmanship at ten times the level. It is page count, whether photography is included, whether copy is written or supplied, and how many revision rounds sit in the contract. Ask for those four variables before comparing two quotes, because a cheap quote with two revision rounds and a costly quote with unlimited rounds are different products.

The pitch deck range is wider still, and it is honest. AED 2,000 buys a designer applying your brand to slides you wrote. The top of that range buys narrative work, financial charts rebuilt for clarity, and animation, which is a different job with a different team.

Before you approve anything, ask for the piece list and the per-piece fee in writing. A single line reading "brand collateral" is not a quote.

Printing is a separate bill, and it is smaller than you think

Print costs less than founders expect and finishes cost more. A run of 100 business cards prints for AED 89 to AED 350 at Al Quoz printers. Spot UV adds around 20% to the job. Hot foil adds 35% to 50%.

That spread on cards is stock weight and finish, mostly. Plain 300gsm sits at the bottom. Soft-touch lamination, coloured edges, and 600gsm duplex sit at the top.

Which brings up the question everyone asks at the proof stage. Gloss lamination makes photography pop and fingerprints show, which is why it works for product brochures and fails on a card people hold in a meeting. Matte is softer, takes a pen, and scuffs at the corners over time. If you want spot UV to read at all, you need a matte base underneath it, because gloss on gloss shows nothing. Foil is the one finish that changes how a card feels in the hand, and it is also the one that will not sit flat on a heavily textured stock. Get a physical sample from the printer before you approve a run of 1,000.

One practical note from projects we run: order the design and print separately. Studios that bundle print into the design fee are reselling an Al Quoz press at a markup. Take the print-ready PDF and buy the run yourself.

Why the Arabic version costs more than a translation

Bilingual adaptation adds 50% to 80% to the design fee, or AED 300 to AED 600 per spread. The reason is layout, not language.

Arabic is set right to left. Reversing a layout moves the eye entry point, flips the reading path through a grid, and breaks every asymmetric composition that was built for a left-to-right eye. The image that anchored the top left corner now has to anchor the top right, or the page reads backwards. Arabic type also has different vertical proportions than Latin type, so a headline set at matched point sizes will look mismatched on the page. A designer who has done this before rebuilds the grid. A designer who has not runs the text through a translator, pastes it into the same frame, and hands you a file that looks foreign to half your market.

Fonts are the other line item. Your Latin brand typeface may have no Arabic companion, which means choosing a second family and tuning it to sit alongside the first. That is design work, and it is why the fee is a percentage rather than a flat per-word rate.

The same logic runs through digital, and we cover the web side of it in our guide to bilingual Arabic and English website design. Do the print and the site together if both are on your roadmap, because the type pairing gets solved once instead of twice.

Signage: the design file that has to pass a rule set

Shopfront signage in Dubai is the only piece in the set where the design has to satisfy an authority before it goes up. The Department of Economy and Tourism requires the sign to show one trade name only, mounted horizontally, with the Arabic text placed above the English.

Those three rules constrain the artwork itself. A logo lockup designed as a vertical stack has to be rebuilt horizontally. A brand that trades under one name and markets under a shorter one has to pick a single name for the fascia. Arabic above English also means your Arabic wordmark carries the primary visual weight, which is a decision worth making at the identity stage rather than the fabrication stage.

What is not public: the permit fee and the approval timeline. Neither is published in a form worth quoting, and any number you see online should be checked against your own trade licence and location. The signage contractor who fabricates and installs the sign is normally the one who files the application, so ask them for the current fee and turnaround in writing before you commit to an opening date. Vehicle branding sits under a separate approval route, and the same rule applies: get it in writing from whoever files it.

Freelancer, studio, or premium agency

A freelancer is right when you need three pieces and already own a brand guidelines document. A studio is right for the full set. A premium agency is for brands where the collateral carries the price positioning.

The freelance end of the brochure market sits near AED 1,500 and delivers exactly what the brief describes. That works when your brief is complete, which it usually is not. The cost of an incomplete brief with a freelancer is that you get nine files from four people over five months and none of them match.

A studio charges more because someone holds the system across all nine pieces and the guidelines survive the project. That is the case for buying the full set of marketing materials as one job.

The premium band exists for a real reason. We handle brand and marketing work for names like Fabiana Filippi, Polvere Di Luna, and Toktam Jewelry, and at that end the paper stock, the foil, and the weight of a company profile in someone's hand are part of what the brand claims about itself. If your product sits at AED 200, that spend has no return. If it sits at AED 20,000, the cheap collateral is the expensive mistake.

How long a full set of marketing materials takes

Design timelines in Dubai run 3 to 5 working days for a simple piece, 7 to 10 days for a multi-page document, and 2 to 3 weeks for the complete set. Print adds its own days on top, and signage adds the approval wait.

The variable that stretches everything is your feedback speed. A studio can turn brochure concepts in four days. If sign-off takes two weeks because three people need to see it, that is two weeks added to the schedule and it is not the studio's two weeks. Name one decision-maker before the project starts.

Working backwards from a hard date matters most for exhibitions. If you are showing at a hall in March, the artwork needs to be with the stand contractor weeks earlier, which means design starts before the new year. Every February we get calls from companies who booked the stand in October and thought about the graphics in the last week.

Send us the trade licence, the deadline, and whatever brand files you already have, and we will come back with a piece-by-piece quote rather than one line called "collateral." Get a quote here.

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Written by Artur Gall, CEO and founder of SkyLight Marketing, Dubai.

FAQ

Can I order design only, without printing? Yes, and in most cases you should. Ask for print-ready PDFs with bleed and crop marks, plus the editable source files, then take them to a printer in Al Quoz yourself. Studios that bundle print are usually reselling the press run at a margin.

What is included in a company profile package? A company profile typically covers an introduction, the services or product range, the team, past projects or clients, certifications, and contact details, laid out over 12 to 24 pages. Published prices in Dubai start around AED 2,000. Confirm whether copywriting and photography are inside that figure, because they often are not.

Glossy or matte finish? Gloss is reflective and makes photography stronger, which suits product brochures. It also shows fingerprints. Matte is softer, takes a pen, and is what most cards use. If you want spot UV, choose matte as the base, because the effect needs the contrast to show.

How much do business cards cost to print in Dubai? Al Quoz printers publish AED 89 to AED 350 per 100 cards. Stock weight and finish drive the spread. Spot UV adds about 20% to the job and hot foil adds 35% to 50%.

How much does a pitch deck cost? Published rates run AED 2,000 to AED 75,000. The low end is a designer applying your brand to slides you wrote. The high end includes narrative work, rebuilt data charts, and animation.

Do I need a permit for shopfront signage? Signage in Dubai is regulated by the Department of Economy and Tourism, which requires one trade name, horizontal mounting, and Arabic placed above English. Fees and approval timelines are not published in a reliable public form, so get both in writing from the signage contractor who files your application.

How long does a brochure take from brief to printed copies? Design runs 7 to 10 working days for a multi-page piece, plus your revision rounds, plus the printer's turnaround. Budget three weeks for a comfortable schedule and more if the Arabic version is part of the job.