Lake Flato’s New Website & Brand

A new website and brand come along only so often. Over our 40 years, Lake Flato has maintained a relatively consistent brand identity, tending to its evolution by mostly attending to the work itself.

We sought a strategic update to our website and brand, then, for a few notable reasons. Like our recent office transformations in San Antonio and Austin, we wanted to thoroughly express our values in every touchpoint that defines Lake Flato. Crafting places that belong, designing for health and regeneration, leading with curiosity, and seeking joy—these values define our ethos and are reflected in each section of our new website as well as our new strategic plan.

These values also reflect a firm that is increasingly diverse, and therefore, resilient. We have expanded our partnership group to include voices that reflect the breadth of our services, markets, locations, and professional experiences. We are not just architects, but also interior designers, sustainability experts, urban planners, and industry leaders, responding to the needs of our time with sensitivity, skill, and ingenuity.

While our practice continues to grow and evolve, we hold fast to timeless beliefs: we build responsibly, design artfully, and harness that which is eternal—climate, context, and nature’s patterns and rhythms. Our work, like our new website and brand, highlights the importance of community and craft, coming together to create something larger—a legacy sustained over time and built to last for the next 40 years.

On the Brand Refresh

Working closely with Civilization, we sought to refresh our brand in a way that referenced the firm’s history and values while creating room for its future. We learned that while the original logo needed updating, certain elements held strong emotional resonance, especially the beloved dog mascot.

The Civilization team began with in-depth research, interviewing and surveying the entire firm alongside key collaborators and clients. Their approach was shaped by three core principles that guided both the identity and digital experience:

A Sense of Poetry

Lake Flato’s work carries a quiet poetry—its beauty is grounded in purpose, materials, and place. We aimed to mirror that duality, balancing elegant simplicity with meaningful depth across all brand expressions and the new website.

Inspired by Place

Sustainability is inseparable from the firm’s portfolio. Lake Flato’s designs respond to the light, climate, history, and people of a given landscape. This ethos influenced the use of texture, color, and form—favoring warmth, variation, and tactile materials.

A Collective Voice

Lake Flato is not a firm that values the individual. Its work emerges from a culture of collaboration, and the brand needed to reflect that collective spirit.

Branding Elements

The Logo

It was important that the new logo still felt familiar and the characters had a kinship to the old logo. Lake Flato’s new logo reflects the firm’s core values, expressing modernity, clarity, and thoughtful design—perfectly suited for a brand that prioritizes precision and balance. The removal of the slash symbolizes unity, while the K has structure and feels grounded, evoking the strength of our original logo (while doubling as a nod to a roof line often seen in our architecture.) The O introduces a subtle softness that was absent before, emphasizing a sense of approachability. With thoughtful spacing, the sleek, minimalist typeface features clean lines and precise geometry, encapsulating both sensibility and modern design.

The Dog

A key part of Lake Flato’s identity is its vibrant internal culture, one shaped by team drawing sessions, bbq’s, and a strong sense of camaraderie. Historically, the firm’s dog mascot was used informally to represent this internal spirit. We saw an opportunity to elevate that symbol into something more dynamic and participatory. The dog was reimagined as a living logo, one that could be drawn by Lake Flato team members over time. This approach honors the firm’s culture of sketching and play while creating a flexible, ever-evolving visual expression rooted in its people.

The Type

We used Arizona, a variable typeface from Dinamo type foundry.  Arizona Sans is described by Dinamo as a “straight-forward grotesque with a humanistic touch.”

The Color Palette

The color palette draws directly from the materials and landscapes of Texas, including the colors of the ash trees, cypress, limestone, and blackland prairie.

On the Website

The site is built around intuitive, engaging user pathways and visual storytelling, ensuring that each visit feels exploratory. As with the brand, clarity and accessibility are emphasized, never losing sight of the people and stories behind the work.

The new website is built on a flexible grid system that balances structure with spontaneity—rational in its logic, yet open to asymmetry. This approach allows for dynamic combinations of media, generous use of photography, and layouts that can shift between symmetry and asymmetry as needed. By combining structure with adaptability, the grid system ensures the site feels intentional, readable, and user-friendly—while remaining open to poetic expression. Civilization engineered the site to minimize energy consumption and embrace accessibility for all visitors.

Energy Consumption Reduction Features:

• Smart file compression on upload
• Media loaded only when appearing on screen, served with optimized next-gen WebP format
• All images use SRCSET to load the most efficient image file available for each screen
• Image focal points reduce need for duplicative image variants

Accessibility updates:

• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA and AAA compliant (variance based on content)
• Controls and settings for screen readers and browsers for blind and low-vision users
• Reduced motion settings detection to aid users with vestibular disorders
• Keyboard control for blind, low-vision, and mobility impaired