Fire and Emergency New Zealand is New Zealand's unified urban and rural firefighting and emergency services organisation. It was established on 1 July 2017 to bring together the New Zealand Fire Service, the National Rural Fire Authority, and 38 rural fire districts and territorial authorities. They are responsible for New Zealand's fire safety, firefighting, hazardous substance incident response, vehicle extrication and urban search and rescue, employing over 1,800 professional career firefighters and over 11,000 volunteer firefighters. Fire and Emergency is a Crown Entity and is governed by a Crown Appointed Board.
I worked as Fire and Emergency's in-house graphic designer from October 2019. The next day after I started, the New Zealand International Convention Centre fire began, which was later classified as a "sixth-alarm", the highest category of response for an urban fire in New Zealand. By the end of my first week, I had designed my first digital billboard to thank Aucklanders for their support. After that, we were running at full speed, creating internal and external-facing projects while developing the organisation's still-new branding. I worked on my first nationwide marketing campaigns as an in-house production artist, and was very proud to be a small part of incredible work created for Fire and Emergency by FCB, WonderLab, Flux, Mark Creative, Creature and many others.
Below are just some examples of the work produced during my time in that role. It was a fantastic opportunity and an incredible learning experience, and I am forever grateful to everyone at Fire and Emergency NZ.
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 production manager and the team of 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.
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.
When I joined Fire and Emergency New Zealand in October 2019, their Annual Report was just finishing production and was almost ready for release. One of my first big projects was to create a video that broke down important statistics in the report and presented them in an engaging format. I created detailed animations of the organisation’s koru and fern design, as well as overall editing and sound mixing of the final video. The chart animations in the video were produced by Mark Creative. This video was shared across official social channels, frequently played at corporate events and became a prominent part of the content rotation on screens throughout corporate headquarters.
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.
This communications strategy sets a framework for how effective communications will support Fire and Emergency New Zealand to achieve its strategic priorities. I designed the book in early 2020 and prominently featured artwork used in recent fire safety awareness campaigns in the layouts. The books were presented to members of the Board in early 2020.
Hiwa-i-te-rangi is a 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.
I have designed various charts and infographics while at Fire and Emergency. Each one needed to conform to the 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.
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.
In 2022 I re-imagined and streamlined the design for future Pride events to include an alternate design that is based on the transgender flag. 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.
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 quarterly. I designed all visual aspects of the magazine including cover photo selection and treatments, and page/article layouts.
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. Occasionally some outside-the-box thinking was required for these: for the 3-Step Escape Plan image, I achieved the child-like crayon illustration style by drawing with my non-dominant hand, and for the cellphone group chat post, I staged a fake conversation with friends and fed them their lines to post for an accurate screenshot. These were used across Fire and Emergency’s official Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
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 at Fire and Emergency.