How did we do it ? And why Do for Self is important.
Jul 24, 2026
One of the things we have learned is “Don’t pay someone to do stuff you can do yourself.” Do it for yourself. Creating a new business card is a great example of opportunity profit. So is doing your own plumbing or doing the accounting for your business. Don’t be too quick to outsource a task at the edge of your skills. Instead, use the opportunity to expand your skills. Always consider the investment of upgrading your skills.
When you pay someone else, you are foregoing a huge opportunity profit. The process of doing something new, difficult, and challenging is not just rewarding; it is educational and financially rewarding. Society encourages all of us to take the easy route and pay someone else. But that is a short-sighted approach.
Each new task is a chance to learn a new skill, develop a new talent, or work with new people. And a chance to either earn money or avoid a cost.
Another reason to do things for yourself is you control the quality. You get to make every decision our the quaity of your product. All the big things and all the little things.
Before we get started, we want to recommend a wonderful textbook on two-dimensional design that we found helpful. Launching the Imagination 2D: A Comprehensive Guide to Two-Dimensional Design (McGraw-Hill). There is nothing like reading to learn a new skill and then applying it.
So how much did the logo cost ?
When starting a new project, you must consider both profit and cost. You must balance the opportunity cost with the opportunity profit of each new endeavor. We estimate our time at $50.00 per hour for work and $25.00 per hour for non-work. So the image probably costs more than $1000 (40 hours times $25.00) per hour. But we have developed a new skill. Graphic design.
So we have come to our new business card. The card was difficult. We used a highly rated graphic design tool called Inkscape. We recommend it along with Affinity Designer. Both have a learning curve. We built or collected the images and graphics over time. This is the seventh version.
We watched Inkscape videos, graphic design videos and business card videos. We practiced for hours in Inkscape drawing basic shapes and colors. We wasted hours trying to draw a simple straight line in the Bezier tool.
The graphic logo in the corner is hand drawn. The colors are based on money green and gold. Each pipe and connector is assembled from basic elements like rectangles and curves.
The image and card
The images were selected from the best achievements in Black economics: Freedman’s bank, Booker T Washington and Madame CJ Walker. Plus the famous business people. We added the HLOC redlining map to emphasize our data analysis skills and deeper knowledge.
The end results is an authentic, hand drawn image. It just has to be good, not perfect.
(.SVG image for downloading is shown below)
We are including the same image in “.SVG” format so you can download and explore in detail, and deconstruct how we created the image. Start with the “ungroup” function.
Just a quick note on AI. We could have created the image in AI. It probably would be more appealing to a general audience. But it would have miss the realism, honesty and “soul” of a real image.
We do use AI, but mostly for suggestions and basic corrections; not for original content. We have found AI to be “soulless”.” A shiny object found on the ground that attracts attention but has little long term value. So far.