Jess L McPeak

Wildfire safety education design for the Santa Barbara County FireSafe Council

SBCFSC's mission is to promote wildfire safety through education and action, serving every community in the county, including 67 Firewise communities and rural, low-income, and bilingual neighborhoods.

I worked with the council as a contract graphic designer, supporting its educational mission across a connected body of work: localized game boards for a wildfire-preparedness serious game, a brand-extended system of educational templates, the finished course materials built from that system, and the 2025 Impact Report.

Wildfire games

Our first project was a tabletop game that teaches wildfire evacuation and preparedness. Players evacuate across a community map while a designated Fire player spreads fire using day, time, wind direction, and fire location spinners. Chance Cards inject realistic complications and reward concrete preparedness habits.

Each board is a styled, real-world map of one community, created using Photoshop and Illustrator. I produced boards for ten communities: Santa Barbara, Goleta, New Cuyama, Carpinteria, Montecito-Summerland, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Los Alamos, Guadalupe, and Santa Ynez.

I also revised the Chance Card design and production. Rather than a fixed deck, I built the Chance Cards as a reusable, documented template. The deck can grow with the program without a designer in the loop for every change.

Extending the brand

Alongside the game, the council asked me to redesign and unify its public education materials. The council provided a California Fire Safe Council style guide to work from, but I found inconsistencies in it, so I resolved those into a single coherent system that staff could actually apply: Montserrat SemiBold for headers and Source Sans 3 for body, on a consistent grid with defined color roles and iconography.

The deliverable was a set of slide-deck and print-document templates. Color-coding by audience lets the council produce new materials for any program while keeping everything visibly part of one identity.

Fire-resilience courses

With the template system in place, I produced the finished materials for two of the council's fire-resilience certificate courses: the landscaping and firescaping course, aimed at designers & landscapers; and course workbooks & a trifold brochure for the home hardening course aimed at architects & builders. Both sets carried the audience-specific styling from the template system into real classroom and field use.

2025 Impact Report

The council's annual summary was given to me as an 18-page document built in Canva by the Communications Coordinator. I rebuilt it from the ground up in InDesign to make a polished, print-ready report.

The project ran as an iterative process: after the Communications Coordinator and Executive Director approved the first draft, I worked through a revision round covering brand-accurate colors and icons, corrected financial figures, QR codes, and page trims, then delivered the final print and digital files.

Conclusions

These projects brought several disciplines together around the need to keep wildfire-safety materials clear and usable for a broad, mixed audience.

What I value most about it is how much was designed for handoff. It is work that has to keep working long after I have sent the final files.