How did we do it ?
Jul 24, 2026
One of the things we have learned is “Don’t pay someone to do stuff you can do yourself.” Do for self. Creating a new business is a great example of opportunity profit.
When you pay some 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 finically rewarding. Society encourages all of us to take the easy route and pay someone else. But that is a short signeted 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.
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 cost more than $1000 (40 hours times $25.00) per hour.
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
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.