Design · Marketing · Websites

Saticoy Sensible Development.

This project established a comprehensive digital resource and advocacy platform for Saticoy Sensible Development, a grassroots community initiative in East Ventura.

Web & Collateral

A hand holding a phone showing the Saticoy Sensible Development site and its headline opposing an 8-pump fuel depot, held up at the Wells Road intersection the campaign is about.

About this project

A developer applied to put an eight-pump, sixteen-nozzle fuel depot and a fast-food drive-thru at Wells and Darling Roads, in the middle of residential East Ventura. The application is PROJ-23-0424, and almost everything a resident would need to argue against it was already public: environmental findings, traffic studies, hearing dates, hundreds of pages of it.

The neighborhood was not short of opposition. It was short of somewhere to point. Scattered across a city portal in planning language, the facts were technically available and practically useless.

What I did

Built it to look neutral, not angry. This is the decision the whole project turns on. A protest flyer gets discounted by the people it is addressed to. The site reads as a record: the proposal, the findings, the timeline, stated plainly and sourced, so a council member and a neighbor can both take it at face value.

Translated the documents instead of linking to them. Traffic counts, pump volumes, setback distances and environmental risk, pulled out of the filings and stated in numbers a person can hold.

Removed the friction from the one action that counts. Letter templates and a direct route to the council members and the planning commission, because the gap between caring and filing formal comment is almost entirely administrative.

Put the address in the neighborhood. Cards in windows and handed across fences, carrying one URL. Local organizing still happens on foot.

A folding table at the intersection holding a tall stack of planning documents and rolled plans, with a phone showing the site standing beside it. — The paperwork on the table, the site on the phone beside it. Same information. One version a neighbor can actually read.

What changed

The campaign has one address. Residents send emails, sign the petition and put opinions on the record from the same place that summarizes the planning documents they would otherwise have to go and find.

Wells Road is still open, so this is a status rather than a result.

The website gives our group legitimacy. We always post the link in our inquiries to agencies and communications to the public. It takes a lot of our information and puts it all in one place. This makes for quick and easy access for anyone interested in getting more information, and how to help.

Lynn, Research and communications

The work

Shown at size.

Four residents standing at the Wells Road crosswalk, one holding a phone showing the campaign site and one holding a printed card, with houses and the open lot behind them.

A red Saticoy Sensible Development card taped inside a window: a white brain mark, the web address, and the line A place for community feedback on the Wells Road project.

A laptop, phone and stack of red Saticoy Sensible Development cards on a wooden table beside reading glasses and a cup of coffee.

655 Rehearsal Studios.

655 is a rehearsal studio in Upland, California, co-owned by four partners. I am one of them, and the brand, the website, the social and the systems behind them are my side of it. This is what the work looks like when I am also one of the people paying for it.

See it