Award-Winning Design for the $4.9B LAX People Mover

Lu Hickman Creative Co. won a 2019 American Graphic Design Award, presented by GDUSA, for the capabilities brochure we designed for Legacy Foundations, a division of Shimmick, as part of its pursuit of the foundations work on the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Automated People Mover. The brochure did exactly what it was built to do. Legacy Foundations won the contract.

That outcome is the part we are proudest of. A capabilities brochure in the AEC industry is not a coffee-table piece. It is a sales tool aimed at the people who decide who gets to build some of the largest infrastructure in the country. For this pursuit, the brochure positioned Legacy Foundations as a foundations subcontractor going after the scope, and its job was to make a complex, technical team feel credible and ready in just a few pages. We told a clear story about Legacy Foundations' expertise, its presence in the Los Angeles region, and the depth of its drilling fleet and equipment, translating heavy civil capability into something the selection team could absorb quickly and believe in.

The win mattered because of the stage it played out on. The LAX Automated People Mover is part of Los Angeles World Airports' multi-billion-dollar Landside Access Modernization Program, and the people mover itself is one of the largest public works contracts in the history of the City of Los Angeles. Legacy Foundations secured the foundations scope within it, a contract that started around $50 million and ran from 2019 to 2021 under LAX Integrated Express Solutions (LINXS) Constructors. Since then, Legacy Foundations has secured additional foundations work on the project, nearly doubling the original contract.

What Legacy Foundations went on to build shows the scale of the work the brochure helped land. On the LAX Automated People Mover, the team drilled more than 26,000 linear feet, installed roughly 12 million pounds of reinforced steel, and placed over 36,000 cubic yards of concrete across more than 400 cast-in-drilled-hole (CIDH) shafts. They set over 4,300 linear feet of permanent shoring in large-diameter drilled shafts and, at peak, ran up to five drilling spreads across multiple shifts, all with zero recordable incidents inside one of the busiest airports in the United States. That is the magnitude of the contract a single well-built capabilities brochure helped open the door to.

This is the work we love most. Lu Hickman Creative Co. designs for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry because we understand it deeply, and that understanding is what separates collateral that simply looks good from collateral that actually wins. We know what a foundations contractor needs to prove, who is reading the proposal, and how to make technical strength feel clear and confident on the page. When the graphics are built by people who speak the language of the industry, they do more than dress up a bid. They help win it.

Lu Hickman Creative Co. is a certified MBE/WBE boutique design and marketing agency headquartered in Houston, TX, with presence in Chicago and São Paulo, serving clients across the United States. The firm holds WBE, MBE, Hire Houston First (HHF), HUB, and SBE designations and has earned six GDUSA awards in addition to two 2025 HBMA Lantern Awards.

Services include brand identity and guidelines, capabilities brochures and sales materials, proposals and RFP design, interactive presentations, and full marketing collateral systems, all built for firms that compete in technical industries.

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