The official design of a company credit card involves numerous stakeholders, ideas and requirements. The final design included photo retouching on the trucks (with added shadows and the removal of reflections in the windscreen glass) and a mix of the two prominent red and navy corporate colours to make sure the card was instantly recognisable from a distance and much easier to distinguish from personal banking cards. The new cards went into circulation in 2021.

Fire and Emergency NZ was established in 2017 after previously existing as the New Zealand Fire Service. By the time I started in October 2019, the brand’s initial launch was needing some enhancement and further development. Working collaboratively with the Fire and Emergency marketing team and the creatives at WonderLab, I assisted with developing and shaping the guidelines for the brand going forth. This included communicating with brands featured in the guidelines to ensure we had the right logos, updating photographs to more modern examples, specific adjustments to spacing around the logo marks, simplifying usage examples around logo versions on coloured backgrounds, separating some instructions to more relevant documents (eg. uniform guidelines), incorporation of Pantone colours, and layout adjustments of the overall presentation.

FCB New Zealand designed the Fire Gets Real Fast logo mark for Fire and Emergency, to be used as a secondary logo element in designs across digital, print and video. I was asked to design a te reo version of this logo and to create a one-page visual identity guideline document for the English version.

I have designed various charts, infographics and posters while at Fire and Emergency. Each one needed to conform to our company’s brand guidelines with fonts, colours and icons.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic needs no introduction. For communication with our nationwide staff, the idea was suggested that we come up with a ‘look’ to unite all of our communications in a similar way to the government’s yellow and white stripe aesthetic. I wanted to do something abstract that incorporated those stripes in a subtle way. The artwork I created as a solution can be interpreted as a burning fire, a mountain peak and a heat map. This design was then applied to dozens of new signage and collateral that had to be developed at a very rapid speed while we all began the adjustment to remote work. As well as signage around our corporate offices, this artwork was used on posters in hundreds of fire stations around the country and across our official social channels. The art for this campaign was well received and its consistent application in COVID-related communications allowed us to successfully bring it back for 2021’s vaccination communications.

On 1 July 2017, Fire and Emergency New Zealand was established under a new law, the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017. This book was produced to celebrate the achievements and progress the organisation has made in the three years since. I designed the book including layouts, style and cover treatment recommendations. Copies were distributed to staff across New Zealand in December 2020. (Click here to read this book on Fire and Emergency's website.)

Ignite is Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s quarterly staff magazine. It represents the voices of the people across the country who dedicate themselves to protecting life, the environment and property in their communities. 4,500 copies of each issue are distributed to fire brigades around the country four times a year. I designed all visual aspects of the magazine including cover photo selection and treatments, and page/article layouts. (Click here to read past issues of Ignite)

I was asked to contribute to Fire and Emergency’s new uniform hats with the addition of the official poutama design. I expanded the poutama to cover a larger area in both directions and experimented with layout options that wouldn’t clash with the different logo or text elements. During the design stage, I came up with the idea of black-on-black for the poutama. The result was so well received, the uniform team later added matching black-on-black poutama designs to other areas on the uniforms.

Fire and Emergency staff have marched in the annual Pride parades in New Zealand since 2018. In 2020 I added motion graphics to their video of the Wellington Parade. For the 2021 event, I was asked to enhance the design the Pride committee had created for their t-shirts. I worked with them to bring their vision to life and enhance the colours and presentation of the graphic. The new t-shirts were incredibly well received with staff requesting their own shirts throughout the year. The design was carried over to social media content and I worked on developing a prototype of enamel pins. (Click here to learn more)

After designing the identity for Fire and Emergency’s Pride in previous years, one of my final projects in my role was to re-imagine and streamline the design for 2022 and later Pride events. The final design is a streamlined version of previous years’, with the Whanaungatanga design taking on the colours of the rainbow and trans flags. Concepts for t-shirts, lanyards and pins were supplied to the Pride team before my departure. On 10 March 2023, Whiria te Tāngata was launched officially as Fire and Emergency's Rainbow Network. The pins and lanyards are awarded to staff and personnel who complete a learning module focused on understanding the important of Rainbow communities, how to use inclusive language, how gender and sex differiate, and where to go for more information. (Click here to learn more)

Te Tohu is awarded to Fire and Emergency staff who read the He Tīmatanga Kōrero guide and complete the online knowledge check. It symbolises progression in their cultural education as well as support for Fire and Emergency’s commitment to working with Māori as tangata whenua. I worked closely with the Pou Takawaenga Māori/Māori Liaison Team to design the tohu. It was completed over two months with several revisions and ideas presented to the wider team for consideration. The final design resembles a chevron and was hand crafted from recycled rimu. The tip of the chevron faces upward, resembling the peak of a mountain and an acknowledgement of the mahi that lies ahead. Reflected in Te Tohu are the nine stars of Matariki, with Hiwa-i-te-rangi highlighted to represent the programme’s aspirations. The steps of the poutama are also included, representing the never-ending journey to strive and improve. The tohu was officially introduced at Fire and Emergency’s first Matariki dawn ceremony, 2 July 2021.

Hiwa-i-te-rangi is a three-year programme designed to bring to life Fire and Emergency’s commitment to working with Māori as tangata whenua by improving the way they serve Māori communities. The He Tīmatanga Kōrero book is an educational resource designed to support staff to start or progress their cultural education. When we received Chris Davidson’s incredible illustrations from WonderLab, I immediately knew the book had to be designed around them as the visual focus, with little to no photographs or the corporate colour scheme of red and navy. The final book was 52 pages and took two weeks to create. The book was officially introduced at Fire and Emergency’s first Matariki dawn ceremony, 2 July 2021, with supporting pull-up banners and posters designed in a similar style. Special thanks to the Hiwa-i-te-rangi team: Caitlin Mackay, Piki Thomas, Isaia Piho, Amy Jansen and Rachel Perkins. (Click here to learn more)

While working at Fire and Emergency NZ, I was asked to create various pieces of content for social media. Some of these were in support of direct campaigns, others were broader fire safety awareness messages, and some were silly and fun for holidays and social events. These were used across Fire and Emergency’s official Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Fire and Emergency’s 2020 and 2021 summer campaigns came from 2019’s summer, when wildfires destroyed over 10,000 hectares of native bird habitat. Three of New Zealand’s most loved native birds were chosen as the stars of these campaigns. The summer wildfire prevention campaigns appeared in newspapers, social media, on the back of trucks, at Department of Conservation Visitor Centres, camp grounds, service stations, online and on airport billboards. The campaign was also supported by radio advertising and partnerships with MetService with TVNZ. My role in the campaign was layout and design support, taking the initial artwork and re-creating it for the dozens of different mediums and media required, continuing into applications beyond the summer campaigns. The campaign was produced and art directed by FCB New Zealand with the incredible bird artwork created by Flux, and it was the winner of 3 Gold awards at the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards 2020. (Click here to read about the campaign launch)

In 2019 Fire and Emergency started a ‘new tradition’ with a mark and an annual nationwide advertising campaign that will help New Zealanders recognise businesses and organisations’ that employ Fire and Emergency volunteers as part of their support crew. Wellington agency Creature designed the mark and FCB New Zealand created the first annual campaign to represent the collaboration between volunteers, their employers, and Fire and Emergency. My initial involvement with this campaign was working with FCB’s layouts and Creature’s mark design to create content across multiple mediums and media, including social, posters, signage, books, and web advertising. I created an animated version of the mark which was very well received. It was used as content for Fire and Emergency’s social media and later broadcast as part of a segment on The AM Show.

“National Volunteer Week is 20-26 June and an opportunity for us to come together and thank volunteers, their whānau, employers, supporters and all those who work alongside them.“ For the 2020 campaign, FCB New Zealand came up with the core visual of a yellow-and-orange gradient box around our hashtag.
I expanded the treatment into layouts for print, social and web, including a custom Facebook frame which reached 1.4 million impressions, wrap-up infographic, thank you cards and a digital toolkit for brigades.

“National Volunteer Week is 20-26 June and an opportunity for us to come together and thank volunteers, their whānau, employers, supporters and all those who work alongside them.“ I designed the look of the 2021 campaign built around the idea of us showcasing peoples’ comments from Facebook thanking volunteers, which were then displayed on digital billboards and street panels around the country that were swapped out daily with new comments. A total of 97 digital billboards and street panels were created over the week, as well as content for social media, print advertisements, and digital advertising images. The billboards were shown at 17 sites throughout New Zealand with an estimated 602,322 impressions. The street panels were displaying at 20 sites per day at 155 locations, reaching up to 1.4 million viewers. In total, the campaign delivered approximately 9,961,994 impressions and a collective reach of 2,792,433 people. (Click here to read more about this campaign)

Smokey is the cute personified smoke alarm who stars in Fire and Emergency NZ’s campaigns to raise awareness of smoke alarm safety. The campaign was created by FCB New Zealand with Smokey artwork and animation created by Flux, with in-store promotion by Cartel Media. As part of this campaign, I designed a floorplan graphic that I later expanded into this poster, which was displayed prominently in The Warehouse, Mitre 10 and Bunnings stores around New Zealand.

One in four house fires start in the kitchen, and unattended cooking is the leading cause of New Zealand house fires. To spread awareness of this issue, Fire and Emergency created a 30 second video to target different demographics. Once the video was completed, my role was to take selected stills from the video and expand them into a complete static campaign across web, social, print, TVNZ On Demand content and outdoor advertising. This required finding a simple layout that would work for the different mediums and formats using still images taken from the videos. The digital billboards were Fire and Emergency’s first experimentation with timed events, appearing in the evening driving / pre-dinner periods of 4pm to 8pm for maximum impact. The campaign saw results of 13.07 million impressions and a collective reach of 4.45 million viewers.

In October 2019 (and the week I started at Fire and Emergency), the SkyCity Convention Centre caught fire and took over 140 firefighters several days to put it out. There was an outpouring of public appreciation toward the fire fighters including food donations, video messages and hundreds of comments online and in person thanking them for the work they were doing. I designed a social post that would be a simple, bold “thank you” message for the people of Auckland. Soon after posting it, Fire and Emergency was gifted advertising space on a JCDecaux New Zealand billboard, and I was asked to adapt my social post into this new medium. It was a wonderful end to an incredibly eventful first week on the job. (Click here to learn more)