Wildfire safety education design for the Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council
Case Study · Jess L McPeak · Contract Graphic Designer, since Sept 2025
Overview
The Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council (SBCFSC) is the county branch of the California Fire Safe Council, and one of the three largest in the state. Its mission is to promote wildfire safety through education and action, and it serves the whole county, including 67 Firewise communities and many rural, low-income, and bilingual ones.
I joined the council as a contract graphic designer in September 2025. My work there has covered four main things: visual assets for a wildfire-preparedness board game, a set of branded templates for the council's education materials, the finished course materials built from those templates, and a redesign of the 2025 Impact Report. Most of it came down to one problem: holding a single visual identity across formats as different as a printed game board and a classroom slide deck.
The wildfire serious game and its community maps
The game is a tabletop game that teaches wildfire evacuation through play. Players evacuate across a real map of their own town while one player spreads fire using spinners for wind, location, day, and time. Chance Cards add realistic complications, like downed power lines, heavy smoke, abandoned cars, or no cell service, and they reward the habits that actually help in an evacuation: knowing your neighbors, keeping a Go Bag packed, having driven your route before.
The game itself started in Tom Maiorana's research group at the UC Davis Department of Design, where I worked as a research assistant. Tom led the game design. My early contributions were to the instructions and the production methods. By the time the game reached SBCFSC the design was settled, and my job there was the visual side: the printed pieces, and a version of the board for each community the council serves.
The community boards are the bulk of that work. Each board is a real map of one town, drawn in Adobe Illustrator. I styled the actual streets and landmarks (Highway 101, the Old Mission, Hope Ranch, Elings Park, the Botanic Garden) in the council's colors, then laid a numbered play grid over the top, with a compass, custom markers for the landmarks, and set spots for the Fire, Wind, and Chance decks. The real geography is the whole point: people practice leaving on the roads they actually drive. I made boards for ten towns (Carpinteria, Goleta, Guadalupe, Lompoc, Los Alamos, Montecito-Summerland, New Cuyama, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, and Santa Ynez), so I set the map up as a system I could adapt town by town, then took each one through rounds of local review to get the streets, trail routes, labels, and boundaries right.
The game also uses a set of spinners, for wind direction, fire location, day, time, fire spread, and movement. I gave them a warm gradient, amber in the center fading to ember red at the rim, so the fire controls look different at a glance from the green used everywhere else. The sheets are laid out to be printed, cut, and assembled by hand.
The Chance Cards are built as a template the council can reuse. Each card uses the same simple grid: an icon, a title, and a short instruction. I wrote notes into the file so staff can copy the layout and add their own cards later, without needing a designer.
Extending the brand into an education toolkit
The council also asked me to redesign and unify its public education materials. I took its existing brand (the logo, the forest-green and amber colors, the display type) and built it out into a reusable system: Montserrat SemiBold for headings, Source Sans 3 for body text, a set grid, and defined color roles. I had the California Fire Safe Council style guide to work from, but its type rules contradicted each other in places, so I sorted them into one version staff could actually follow.
What I delivered was a set of slide-deck and print templates, color-coded by audience: a generic and internal version, plus home hardening, landscaping and firescaping, realtors, and teachers and students. The color-coding lets the council build new materials for any of those groups, and everything still reads as one brand. The council's education program manager called it a strong set of resources for their programs.
Materials for the fire-resilience certificate courses
I then used the templates to produce the finished materials for two of the council's fire-resilience certificate courses. The first was the landscaping and firescaping course, which the council runs with the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden for landscape designers and architects; for it I designed the slide deck and a matching booklet. The second was the home hardening course, where I designed the slide deck, the workbooks, and a trifold brochure. Both used the audience styling from the template system, so what people saw in the room matched the rest of the council's materials.
2025 Impact Report
The 2025 Impact Report is the council's yearly summary of its programs, finances, partners, and community stories. It started as an 18-page Canva file built by the communications coordinator, Juliet Costell, and I rebuilt it from scratch in Adobe InDesign for print.
The cover pairs the large IMPACT REPORT 2025 lockup with a duotone-green photo of the Santa Barbara foothills. Inside, the section pages run full-bleed deep green, with amber headings and a two-column layout: short amber labels like Who We Are and Our Mission on the left, the body copy on the right. The same system carries through the council's three program areas (Landscape, Built Environment, and Community) and the rest of the report. One page highlights the council's new Certified Firescaping Providers Directory, with a screenshot of the site and a QR code; the others cover the financials, partners, funders, and donors.
It was a back-and-forth with the council. Once Juliet Costell and the executive director, Anne-Marie Parkinson, approved the first draft, I worked through a round of revisions covering the brand colors and icons, corrected financial figures, QR codes, and page trims, then sent the final print and digital files.
Reflection
Across these projects I moved between fairly different kinds of design: drawing maps, building template systems, and laying out a print report. The common thread was making wildfire-safety information clear for a wide mix of people.
The part I care about most is how much of it was built to be handed off. The maps follow a system I can repeat for the next town, the card deck and the templates are things the council can keep using and adding to without me, and the Impact Report is built properly for print. I like design that keeps working after the final files go out.