ABOUT LVBROWN STUDIO
Lauren Virginia Brown (LVB) founded LVBrown Studio in 2014 to offer her unique conceptual design services to professionals in the water resources and ecological restoration fields. Over the ten years since the studio’s founding, LVB’s design services have expanded to include interpretive signage design, illustrated maps and environmental illustration.
Lauren draws from over twenty years of experience spanning professional landscape architecture to academic and applied expertise in river and ecological restoration. After an eight-year initial career with the SWA Group in Houston, Lauren left Texas to learn about watershed science and policy at UW-Madison in Wisconsin. There, she earned two master of science degrees in Landscape Architecture and Water Resources Management.
Lauren draws from strong site design and spatial analysis skills from her landscape architecture career. She speaks the same language as water resource engineers and ecologists from inter-disciplinary coursework at UW and a three-year apprenticeship with Inter-Fluve Inc. As design principal of LVB, Lauren helps her clients and project teams analyze and problem-solve while producing compelling final visual deliverables that communicate the plan, map or story.
The process of problem-solving is hands-on for LVB. The magic begins when the pencil hits paper (or now the digital tablet). LVB uses a unique blend of media, including GIS mapping software, hand-drawn and digital illustrations, and Adobe’s graphic design suite. Final visual products are used in stakeholder engagement materials, public outreach campaigns, brochures and guidebooks, client websites, StoryMaps, and physical displays such as trailhead kiosks and interpretive signage displays.
LVBrown Studio is a woman-owned small business located in Austin, TX, collaborating with clients nationally and internationally.
LVBrown Studio is a federally-registered EDWOSB | SDB | WBE | WOSB, Unique Entity ID: FC8NTWLDLFN3 / Cage Code 7S7L4, and a registered Texas HUB Vendor #20512782).
About Lauren
Visual problem solver. Water-lover. Wind-lover. Free-spirit. Creative yet practical. Scientist and Artist. Naturally curious. Lover of maps and navigating without them. SUP-er, Sailor, Flamenco Dancer. Multi-passionate. Believes that good design matters and that there is magic in the art of it.
About our Design Process
All LVB Design projects move through three main phases of design and begin with a project kickoff meeting, subsequent design reviews, and ending with final deliverables.
The Project Understanding phase involves reviewing project goals and desired outcomes with the Client, absorbing project resources, preparing drawing basemaps, and assimilating the background materials.
The Project Ideation phase is where the pencil hits the page (or tablet), and ideas emerge in visual form in pencil sketches, quick color washes, and rough mockups. This is an iterative design phase where we review drafts and test design solutions together.
Once the Client approves design drafts, the project moves into Final Production, where LVB refines the illustrated works, formats, proofs, and packages the final deliverables for the Client’s intended use.
**While aspects of the design phases overlap, it’s important for the Client to share relevant data during the Understanding Phase and provide approval on drafts before moving to Final Production to stay within the estimated project time and budget.
