Colossal

Maven Creative’s work on Colossal’s Dallas headquarters spans almost 50,000 square feet.

Environmental graphics, wayfinding, murals, LED content, projection mapping, print and interior direction – Maven shaped them all in partnership with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm and his in-house team. The project is the output of a relationship that’s more than a decade old, and marks the first time the Orlando-based creative agency has worked on a space with Lamm.

The brief arrived as a point of view rather than a fixed set of parameters. “Most of our briefs come directly from Ben,” Maven’s Design Director Sean Jones tells us, “ they are an ambition for what something could be.” From there, the studio’s job was to take the broad strokes and turn them into walls, screens, surfaces and shelves. It started as creative direction for external collaborators, but expanded into co-direction of the entire build, with Maven embedded alongside the architect, contractors and vendors as decisions were made.

The conceptual frame that Maven and Lamm have worked with since developing Colossal’s identity in 2020 is what Jones describes as the balance between “MIT and MTV” – cutting-edge science made cultural and accessible, a biosciences company positioned as a global movement. “Whether you’re a new employee or a high-stakes investor, the goal was for you to walk in and immediately feel part of something bigger,” Jones explains.

Wayfinding was the device through which much of this gets delivered, though Maven did not treat it as a separate layer. Walls, floors and ceilings became part of the system, and visitors move through a deliberate sequence – from Colossal’s vision and mission into progressively more advanced scientific environments. The intent, as Senior Designer Marina Kozak puts it, is that “you’re never just navigating the space, you’re learning as you move through it.”

The clearest expression of that thinking is the use of de-extinct species as spatial anchors. Each common workspace is tied to a species Colossal is actively working on, which informed environmental graphics, naming and thematic cues throughout the area. It gives the system a flexible but consistent framework, and turns navigation into narrative.

Layered over the architectural cues is what Maven calls Colossal’s “tech HUD” visual system – the digital language that bridges brand and environment. It governs how information is structured and displayed across LED nano glass, large-format screens and projection mapping, translating the scientific platform into something legible in three dimensions. Kozak describes the working approach as a speculative UX one, which gave the team license to ask what every wall and window would look like as a screen displaying moving data. Familiar interface elements like menu bars and buttons are used as spatial devices, pulling the viewer in through touchpoints they know how to read. Typography across the space utilises Colossal’s two existing brand fonts: NB Architekt and PP Telegraf. The same pairing Maven introduced in the original 2020 identity, now extended into wayfinding, environmental graphics and print.

The murals and art prints sit slightly outside the wayfinding system, doing emotional and cultural work. The architecture, designed by LPA Design Studios, is functional and well-considered for a working lab; Lamm’s instruction was to push the brand layer further than the building’s restraints suggested. Maven describes this as dialling it up to 11. The murals were built with two audiences in mind, with high-level concepts engineered to land for visitors and granular details engineered for the scientists who work in the space. The data used in them is accurate – a layer of easter eggs for the people who can read it. Stylistically, the murals shift depending on placement, feeling cinematic in some spots and more graphic or typographic in others, but they pull from the same principles and tonal contrasts as everything else in the system.

Working from outside Dallas added an additional coordination layer for the Maven team. Decisions had to be made quickly without the studio always being on site, which placed weight on how clearly intent was communicated upfront and how quickly things could be adapted when conditions changed. Some of the heaviest lifting came after the Colossal team had moved in, as areas had to be refined on accelerated timelines ahead of investor and media visits.

The decade-long relationship with Lamm is what made the swing-big approach viable. The Maven team flew to Dallas regularly through the project, with a lot of the strongest decisions coming from working through ideas in real time with Lamm and his team rather than from decks over video calls. “We can swing big. Sure, not everything works on the first try, but we’re ok with that,” Jones concludes. “There’s enough trust on both sides to know we’ll figure it out and make it better.”