Designing for the copier: free safety materials for Arizona's disaster volunteers

Most of the design work we do assumes a screen. Somebody is holding a phone, or sitting at a laptop, and the thing we built has to earn about four seconds of their attention before they scroll.

This project assumed none of that. The finished product is a piece of paper on a wall, and the person reading it may be standing four feet away, may be 70 years old, and may be looking at a third-generation photocopy that somebody ran off at a church.

Who we are working with

Animals and Humans in Disaster, Inc. is an Arizona 501(c)(3) and a federally recognized Medical Reserve Corps unit, #2473. It was founded in 2010 by four women with four bags of food and forty dollars, and it now works across all 15 Arizona counties on preparation, mitigation, response, and recovery. It runs an Animal Division and a Human Division, the latter focused on populations that ordinary emergency planning tends to miss: seniors, people with disabilities, veterans, the chronically ill, people who live alone.

CJ Anderson runs it. She has spent 50 years in emergency planning, is a federal OSHA outreach trainer, taught for the American Red Cross for two decades, and sits as vice chairman of the Arizona Governor's Citizen Corps Council. When she describes a communications problem, it is worth writing down.

The problem she described is a specific one. Her volunteers work service events that operate like FEMA disaster recovery centers: veterans stand downs, United Way Project Connect days, community resource fairs. Staff are spread across acres of parking lot, tents, and buildings. Multiple agencies are on site and none of them share a radio channel. When something happens, finding the right person means calling people one at a time.

What we built

We made four print-ready pieces, all free at kingbirdsolutions.com/ahd:

• A wall flyer at 8.5 x 11, for bulletin boards and registration tables
• A business card at trim size, for anyone ordering a box from a print shop
• Two sheets of ten cards each, with cut marks, so a group with no print budget can run them on an office printer and cut them with a paper cutter

They introduce BuddySOS, a free group safety app. One tap sends an alert and your live location to everyone in your group at the same time. Your emergency contacts get a text with your location whether or not they ever installed anything. You can draw a safe zone around a venue or a campsite and the group is notified when someone arrives or leaves it.

What the audience changed

Here is the part that transfers to other projects.

We designed for grayscale first. CJ raised this before we did, which tells you something about how long she has been doing this. Her rule is that if she uses color, she checks that the black and white version still works, because a nonprofit reprints things on whatever machine is free. So the layout carries no meaning in color alone. Red marks the urgent elements, but every one of them is also the largest, boldest, or most isolated thing in its area. Run the flyer through a copier and nothing is lost.

We tested the QR code at photocopy resolution. A QR code that scans off a crisp original is not the same as one that scans off a copy of a copy. We rendered the finished PDFs down to 72 dpi and decoded them programmatically to confirm they still resolved. We also used a shorter URL than we wanted to, because a shorter string means fewer modules, which means physically larger squares, which means the code survives more abuse.

We made the type bigger than felt comfortable. The audience for this includes stroke survivors and their caregivers. Long lines and small type are not a style question for that reader, they are a barrier. Headline type is set to be read across a room. Body copy runs short lines. Nothing important is set in a light weight.

We put phone numbers on it, not just a URL. Our first version had a blank line where an organization could write in its own contact. CJ asked for two printed numbers instead: one for help with the app, one for volunteering, donations, and disaster support. She was right. This audience reaches for a phone before it reaches for a browser.

What we deliberately did not say

The flyer and both sides of the card carry the same line: in an emergency, call 911 first. BuddySOS is not a medical alert device, it does not detect strokes or falls, and it does not contact 911 for you.

That is on there because the audience includes people at elevated medical risk and the families who worry about them. A safety app aimed at that group has an obligation not to imply more than it does. We also left out a reliability claim we would have liked to make, because we could not trace it to anything the product actually documents. If a claim is not verifiable, it does not go on a piece of paper that a caregiver is going to trust.

That discipline is not charity. It is the same standard we hold on client work, where the temptation to write the stronger sentence is constant and the cost of writing it lands on somebody else.

Why it is free

The print files cost us design time and nothing else. AHD operates on a scale where the annual giving that funds it would not cover a modest software invoice, and the volunteers who would benefit are the people least likely to have anything built for them.

There is also a straightforward version of the answer. Good work in front of the right people is how a small firm gets known. CJ is putting these in the hands of volunteers, survivors, and caregivers across Arizona, and we would rather earn that reach than buy it.

If your unit, camp, clinic, or coalition wants a version of these carrying your own name and phone number, ask us. There is no charge for that either.