Fremantle Lake: a new energy source, a new brand, three weeks.
Fremantle Lake explores geologic hydrogen in California, a clean fuel that forms naturally underground. The company arrived with deep science and a brand still to be built. Three weeks later it had a logo, a brand system, and a seven-page website that explains an energy source most people have never heard of.
- Fremantle Lake
- Clean energy exploration
- Logo, brand system, website design, content, build
- Three weeks, kickoff to launch
Three weeks
weeks from kickoff to a live, public site
One brand system
new brand system: logo, palette, and typography
Seven pages
pages designed, written, and shipped together
Who is Fremantle Lake?
Fremantle Lake is an early-stage exploration company preparing to drill for geologic hydrogen in California. Geologic hydrogen is hydrogen the earth produces on its own, deep in iron-rich rock, which is why it can be clean without being manufactured. The founding team brings senior oil and gas exploration experience and academic geoscience credentials, and their program has drawn recognition from the Breakthrough Energy Fellows community.
The science was credible on day one. The problem was everything around it: almost nobody outside the field knows what geologic hydrogen is, and the company needed a brand and a website on a timeline measured in weeks.
Teach before you persuade
The site had to explain a genuinely unfamiliar energy source in plain language before it could ask anyone to act on it.
Three audiences, one site
Landowners weighing a lease, policymakers weighing support, and neighbors weighing trust all needed different answers from the same pages.
A new brand, no runway
The logo, palette, and site all had to be created new, with no template to lean on and only weeks to work with.
How do you brand an invisible molecule?
You draw where it lives. The mark HMM designed holds the whole thesis in one circle: a waterline flowing across the top, layers of rock settling beneath it. California landscapes above, hydrogen forming in the strata below. Sora, a geometric typeface with soft edges, carries the same balance of precision and approachability through every page.
Four colors, computed rather than eyeballed
Each color has a defined role, and every text pairing the site actually uses was computed against WCAG AA contrast targets, the accessibility standard for legible color, rather than judged by eye. The swatches below are interactive: select one to copy its hex value.
What does a three-week build look like?
Three overlapping phases. Brand decisions came first so that every later choice could inherit from them, and the content and code work ran side by side behind that foundation.
Brand before build
Discovery, naming the visual story, logo concepts, and the style guide: palette, typography, and the wave-and-strata mark. Nothing else started until the company knew what it looked like, because a website built before its brand becomes a website rebuilt after it.
Content and code, together
This is where the speed came from. HMM’s content engine, a proprietary script that works hand in hand with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, drafted page structure, copy, and markup to SEO and accessibility standards while our team directed the voice, checked the science against the client, and designed each section. Seven pages moved in parallel instead of single file.
Prove it, then ship
Responsive checks across devices, accessibility passes, metadata and structured data for search engines, and CookieYes consent for privacy compliance. The site deployed to Vercel from its GitHub repository and went live at fremantlelake.com.
What does the finished site look like?
Better seen than described. The favorite moment is on the Our Approach page, where the seven-step exploration program becomes a scroll feature: a depth marker drills down the page as the visitor scrolls, tracing the search for hydrogen-rich hot rock from surface modeling to production. Play it below, then step through the screens that carry the most design weight.
Four screens, four decisions
Full-screen California water, floating landscape cards, and one ask: request a briefing. Citron is saved for the headline phrase and the actions that matter.
A citron interlude states the mission in a single sentence and sets it in type large enough to be the whole argument.
The explainer teaches before it persuades. Question-led headings mirror the way people actually search, and the copy names what still has to be proven.
Gray, blue, green, and geologic hydrogen compared in dollars per kilogram. The source is cited and the target is labeled as an estimate, not a promise.
The same site in one hand
Most landowners will meet Fremantle Lake on a phone. The mobile build is not a shrunken desktop; navigation, timeline, team, and forms were designed for a thumb first.
Navigation with plain-language subtitles 
Milestones, told as a timeline 
The team, credentials up front 
A leasing form kept deliberately short 
Outreach with the claims kept honest
What did Fremantle Lake walk away with?
A live seven-page site at www.fremantlelake.com, a brand system that works beyond the website, and an operating setup the team does not have to think about.
Hosting on Vercel
Pages served from a global edge network, meaning the site loads fast whether the visitor is in Sacramento or Sydney.
Code on GitHub
The full code history lives in a repository the client owns. No page-builder lock-in, nothing held hostage.
Consent by CookieYes
Cookie consent management that keeps privacy compliance current without a hand-rolled banner to maintain.
The real deliverable is simpler than any of that. Fremantle Lake can now hand one link to a landowner, an investor, or a county official and trust the site to do the explaining. That is what the three weeks bought.
What do people ask about builds like this?
How long did the Fremantle Lake website take to build?
Three weeks from kickoff to launch, and that window included the logo and the full brand system. Brand work ran first; content and development overlapped behind it.
What is the HMM content engine?
A proprietary script that works hand in hand with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, to draft site structure, copy, and markup to SEO and accessibility standards. Our team directs it, edits it, and approves every page before anything ships. Fremantle Lake was one of its first beta builds.
What runs the Fremantle Lake website day to day?
Vercel hosts the site and serves it from a global edge network, meaning servers placed close to wherever the visitor happens to be. GitHub stores the full code history, which the client owns. CookieYes manages cookie consent so privacy compliance stays current.
Does an AI-assisted build mean a generic website?
No. The process moves the mechanical work: scaffolding, markup, metadata, revision cycles. Brand, voice, structure, and review stay human, which is why the finished site looks like Fremantle Lake and not like a template.
Curious what this process would do for your website? Start with our website design service or browse the rest of the case studies.
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