Can You Put a Custom Logo or Design in Your Patio? (Sports, Military & Nautical Inlays)

Most people picture the same thing when they hear the word patio. Something like a rectangle of gray pavers, a very simple repeating pattern, just off the back porch. Then they see a picture of a compass rose built into the stone on someone’s patio, or a team logo sitting in the middle of somebody’s backyard, and they wonder if that can really be done. Can somebody actually do that in their own backyard, and how much extra would it cost?

My name is Randy Thompson, founder of All-Out Hardscapes LLC. We build patios and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Coastal Lowcountry, including Wilmington Island, Savannah Quarters, Pooler, and Richmond Hill. We’ve finished more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces over the past 10 years. We are a certified Techo-Pro installer, which is Techo-Bloc’s certification for installers. We are the only company in the Lowcountry that carries it.

The artistic side of things is why this company exists. We do inlaid colors and basketweave patterns, where pairs of pavers alternate direction like a woven mat, built out of three different paver sizes. We’ve done checkerboard patios as well. On one of our jobs we turned a backyard into Victory Lane for a NASCAR fan because that’s what he wanted to walk out onto every morning. So when somebody asks whether their logo can go in the ground, they are not asking me for something difficult. That’s the type of stuff I love to do, and I chase those kinds of jobs.

Yes, You Can Set a Custom Design Into a Paver Patio

Here is how it actually works, because most people assume we have to hand carve a logo one stone at a time.

An inlay is a finished design built out of pavers and dropped into the middle of a patio, the way a rug sits inside a room. We simply buy the pattern. There’s a manufacturer that does nothing but custom paver artwork, and they create the whole design as a kit for us. Every piece cut to shape, every color running through the stone itself rather than painted on the surface. It arrives on the job as a numbered set that’s easy to install. Everything around it is Techo-Bloc.

That surrounding area is called the field. It’s just the main body of the patio, the simple pattern that covers most of the surface. The inlay of custom artwork goes inside it. Our crew sets the design first, squares it to the house, centers it exactly where you want, then works the field out from there and cuts every paver that connects to the design so the seam closes tight.

So two things decide how much it will cost to add an inlay to your patio: the pattern you get, and how much cutting we have to do to make the design flow seamlessly to the rest of the patio. On your estimate it will be its own line item on top of the patio price. But none of that changes how the base is made or the way the patio drains. Those things stay the same on every job, whether there is a custom design or not.

What Kinds of Designs Can I Put in My Patio?

Three categories cover almost everything people ask us for.

• Sports and team logos: College, pro, or high school. This is what people request the most, and it’s actually the simplest, because a logo is usually a contained shape with a handful of colors.
• Military and patriotic work: The catalog for this one is pretty extensive, including eagle and flag designs. We have two large military installations in this region, plus National Guard and Coast Guard, so a patriotic patio is not a novelty around here. It is somebody’s whole career set in the ground.
• Nautical designs: The one that people really love is a full compass rose, with stone cut and colored so it looks like coiled rope around the outside. We are a water town. A lot of our jobs are done where you can see a creek, a river, or a dock, and a compass in the patio fits that theme beautifully.

Not every custom patio needs a medallion, either. A medallion is the round centerpiece version of an inlay, and plenty of the art we build doesn’t even include one. Color inlaid straight into the field. Basketweave laid up out of three different paver sizes. Checkerboard. A border course, meaning a single row of pavers run around the outside edge like a picture frame. That work is designed and cut by our crew, not a kit we get in the mail.

What Decides How Much a Custom Inlay Adds to My Patio?

Five things determine the cost of a custom inlay, and you can compare your own idea against them before you even start getting quotes.

• How intricate the pattern is: The number of pieces is the main thing here. A clean logo built with bold shapes has a lot fewer pieces than a compass rose with rope detailing around the rim.
• How many colors it has: Every color in the design is a separate run of stone the manufacturer has to produce for us.
• How big it is: A three-foot emblem and an eight-foot centerpiece could be very different in price.
• How much cutting the field takes: A round design dropped into a staggered pattern means every paver that connects to it has to be cut to a curve by hand. A square or rectangular design is much easier and faster to cut.
• How custom it really is: Stock patterns out of the catalog are already engineered and proven. A design nobody has built before has to be drawn, proofed, and produced as a one-time custom piece.

The one thing that never changes is the base and the joints. The inlay sits on the same open-graded stone base we build under every patio, 4 inches of clean #57 stone with 2 inches of #789 chip stone on top and no sand anywhere in it. Those numbers are just sizes of crushed stone, coarser on the bottom and finer on top. Open-graded means the stone is washed free of the fine dust, so rainwater runs straight through instead of sitting in pools under the patio. The joints then get something called polymeric sand, which is a jointing sand that has a binder in it that sets up the first time it gets wet. All of that is already included in the patio price. That is our standard, not an upcharge.

How Much Does a Custom Inlay Cost in Savannah?

There’s really no standard published rate for this the way there is for square footage. That’s because most patio crews in this area don’t offer inlays at all. Doing inlays means sourcing a manufactured pattern and then having people on a saw who can cut a whole field of pavers to meet that pattern perfectly. Plenty of capable installers choose not to offer this at all. So when you ask around, you’re not going to get an average price. You’ll either get a quote or you’ll be turned down.

Here are our numbers, shown as a real example rather than an industry standard. As of August 2026, a sports or team logo inlay runs $1,500. A full nautical compass, rope-look stone included, runs $2,500. That covers the pattern itself and the work to set it into the patio.

Now put that against the job it goes with. A typical backyard patio in this area runs $10,000 to $20,000 depending on scope. Adding $2,500 for a fully custom inlay on a $15,000 project is cheap for what it does to the space. That’s what people will notice. A custom inlay turns your backyard into something that is customized to you, not just a slab.

Will My Inlay Hold Up as Well as the Rest of the Patio?

This is the question we would ask if we were the ones writing the check. A design has a lot more small pieces packed into a few square feet than the rest of the patio has across the whole thing. More pieces means more joints, and joints are where a patio starts coming apart.

On a patio that is built on sand, that’s exactly what happens. When pavers are bedded in sand, water works down, finds the sand, and washes it away. The big field pavers have enough surface area and weight to resist that for three to five years, but the small detail pieces inside an inlay don’t. They will shift and tilt first, so the design goes crooked while the rest of the patio still looks good. That’s why a lot of people have seen a nice medallion go ugly by year three and decided that inlays just don’t last down here.

Ours are built completely differently. The design sits on the same clean stone base as everything around it, with no sand bedding under it to wash out from beneath those small pieces. Then the joints get polymeric sand, which bonds to itself and to the stone the first time it rains, so even the hairline joint in the middle of a rope detail locks in instead of washing out. Small pieces do exactly what the big ones do when we build the way we do.

That’s the whole point of how we work. We’re building this one time. If we never have to come back to your house, we did the job right.

When an Inlay Is Not the Right Call for Your Yard

We will talk somebody out of one when it’s not right for their situation, and we have done that.

Start with size. A medallion needs air around it in order to look like art. On a small patio right off the back door, an eight-foot compass doesn’t look custom, it just looks crowded, and you give up the usable space you were building the patio for in the first place. On a small patio, color banding or a nice border does more for the look than a centerpiece would.

Then think about the fact that it’s permanent. This is stone, not a decal, and not a throw pillow. A team logo you love this season is going to be in that yard for decades and for the next owner after you. Some people know exactly what belongs there, and it is usually the military and Coast Guard families, because that doesn’t change. Everybody else should sit with it for a while before committing.

And if water is your real problem, you should fix that first. A design set into a patio that holds water is still a patio that holds water, and now the standing water is sitting on the prettiest part of it. Grade and drainage are more important than the artwork. They have to come first so the art doesn’t get ruined. That may not be a fun answer, but it’s the honest one.

There is also nothing wrong with wanting none of this. A clean single-color field with a sharp border is a timeless and legitimate patio that will last. Not every backyard has to have a centerpiece.