Business Cards & Elemental Frequencies

The business card — the ultimate symbol of professionalism, polished and impersonal — carries a strange tension. The “Patrick Bateman” legacy made it a cliché: a crisp rectangle of power, hierarchy, and performance. But what if it could be something else entirely?

As I started to build a brand around Locks O. Won (my creative alias), I confronted that question — trying to move away from the coldness of presentation toward something more human. I decided to approach business cards as acts of exchange and create four different designs for connections to choose from. Each one carries energy, tone, and intention. Together they form a deck of frequencies — objects that can be chosen rather than handed out. The idea is to let people gravitate toward the card that feels like theirs, with whatever associations (individual or shared) they bring to the table.

When someone picks a card, they’re not just getting my contact information — they’re showing me something about themselves. The colors, the symbols, and the textures are different for each, but all are bound by the same quiet architecture: grids, light, and elemental motion.

They’re not meant as status markers or branding gestures. They’re a kind of recognition — small objects that hold presence. When someone chooses one, it becomes a point of contact that’s personal, not performative.

Love Measured, Meaning Drawn

Why do cards — from Vegas decks to fortune-telling spreads — carry such symbolic charge? Playing cards and credit cards are household staples, and both trace their lineage back to a shared ancestor: the tarot. For centuries, we’ve trusted these small rectangles to mediate risk, reveal luck, or hold identity — compact mirrors of our systems and our selves.

It was during my final semester at the University of Utah (in Salt Lake City) that I first met the tarot in earnest — that strange twilight between ambition and exhaustion — when I was half-convinced I’d never finish my thesis and would simply dissolve into the carpet of the Marriott Library. Before I tell you what I’ve learned in the thirteen years since — studying and living with the tarot — I should set the scene: the highs and lows of one art historian’s long wrestle with writer’s block.

A Campus of Light and Ghosts

2012 at the University of Utah: I lived in the library. Every day, I’d grab a sandwich from the Union, cross the concrete courtyard, and sink into one of those mid-century womb chairs scattered like punctuation across the marble floor. The library had this faint hum — printers, fluorescent lights, the sighs of other overachievers running on pure panic.

The University had become a kind of ecosystem I’d adapted to perfectly: the brick courtyards, the echo of my own footsteps in the Fine Arts building at night. The writer’s block that swallowed my thesis felt less like laziness and more like a subconscious protest — as if finishing meant being pushed out of a nest I wasn’t ready to fall from.

I loved the campus; it had become my home in that desperately nerdy, Harry Potter-at-Hogwarts way. I knew its architecture, its hidden corners, its quirks of light. The patches of sunlight that filtered through the windows in the lower levels of the Marriott, the secret tunnels under Fort Douglas where I lived, the gazebo in Officer’s Circle where we’d plug in outlaw stereos and run wild across the field — it felt enchanted, the mythology of a place that raised me from adolescence to early adulthood. I learned so much there — not just about art history and the classics, but about myself as a budding scholar — how curiosity, followed too far, becomes its own kind of aesthetic devotion.

Measuring the Immeasurable

The dreaded undergraduate thesis focused on erotostasia — the weighing of Eros — in classical Greek art. It sounds arcane, but what I was really studying was the symbolic and material act of weighing a concept: how humans give shape and measurement to what can’t be measured. On engraved gems, kraters, and gold rings, delicate figures place love itself on a scale. That image — the quantification of an emotion — fascinated me. How do we assign value to feeling? How do we make the invisible visible?

We spend our lives trying to weigh what has no mass. It’s a subtle transubstantiation — the drift of the invisible into form. Love and death: they exist beyond touch yet leave fingerprints on everything. Everyone is drawn to them, and no one fully understands them. Every withered fortune teller knows the truth of it: everyone asks about love, money, and death.

The tarot became a way out of my writer’s block — a new interpretive framework for the philosophical logic of something inherently illogical: measuring the immeasurable. It connected directly to what I’d been writing about, both in theme and in impulse. Across history, the ability to represent the immaterial through number, weight, or symbolic value marks a turning point in how people understand reality. That capacity — to assign structure to the unseen — is at the root of culture, of economies, of faith. Tarot gave me a visual and numerical language for that same human urge to make meaning from what resists measurement.

For the math: C(78, 3) = 76,076 possible three-card draws; with reversals, 2³ × 76,076 = 608,608.

Or, 608,608 ways for the universe to tell you you’re overthinking something obvious.

Learning to Leave

Years later, when I moved to England for my master’s in Archaeology and Anthropology, I found the same threads running through ethnography — the study of how people turn belief into symbol and structure. It felt like a continuation of that first impulse: to find meaning through design, to map what resists mapping.

Years after discovering books about the tarot in my college library, (and yes, I did finish — thesis submitted, nest officially left), I found myself reading tarot cards for other people. From curious art historian (mostly skeptic), as I studied the tarot, I became some kind of believer. For the past couple of years, at festivals and markets in Salt Lake City, under flickering lights and desert wind, I lay cards for strangers. People came looking for guidance, closure, validation.

The deeper I go, the more I feel I’m understanding the elemental resonances that underpin it all: Fire for transformation, Air for thought, Water for emotion, Earth for the tangible. Those four forces shaped not just the cards but how I began to see everything — the structures of design, the flow of conversation, the ways people signal who they are.

Between Hands and Symbols

As I build the world of Locks O. Won, I find myself circling back to that moment of discovery. The business cards, the symbols, the performances — they all feel like continuations of that study in meaning and measure. After years of creation, research, and design, I can only thank the Universe for the strange symmetry of it all: that what began as a thesis on weighing love has become a practice of balancing art, language, and connection.

Design, like divination, is a way of reading energy — holding something up to the light and noticing what reflects back. But it’s also a form of communication — a bridge between symbolic worlds, an act of translation that turns private meaning into shared understanding.