Terrabilt is a design/build company. Our design team provides planning, program standards, design, as well as interpretive and mapping services. We build attractive and durable signs, kiosks, and exhibits for parks, trails, and preserves. Our signs are “green manufactured” using sustainable materials that offer:
Terrabilt has been a design partner of Historic Hudson Valley for more than 25 years. The firm brings not only design expertise and good humor to the various tasks we work on together, but they are true problem solvers, who take the time to explore alternatives and think through complicated questions of brand identity, wayfinding, and infrastructure. On the design side, they provide a distinctive visual grammar that is recognizable, eye-catching, friendly, and readable. On the infrastructure side, they offer innovative solutions tailor made for our different outdoor settings. We strongly endorse their work.
—Rob Schweitzer, Vice President,
Communications & Commerce Historic Hudson Valley
Terrabilt is the result of our decades of work in environmental graphic design for parks/recreation areas, historic sites, as well as legibility research for both road and park signing by Meeker & Associates, our parent company.
Our planning and design experience has made clear the need for quality signage products and a system that creates, builds, and manages signage programs for the long term—especially in multi-park systems. Terrabilt links the processes of planning, design, procurement management, and maintenance with durable, high quality, sustainable products.
We work with park staff and stakeholders to create, implement, and maintain effective wayfinding and visitor information programs. Our mission is to create quality signage to package resources for the public at a modest life-cycle cost.
Terrabilt’s level of service, support, and product quality was exceptional. We fully recommend their products and greatly appreciate Terrabilt’s knowledge of wayfinding + their knowledge of their product + their knowledge of us. They are always responsive to any question I may have; they keep me informed and they understand who we are and what we’re trying to do. Throughout the years Terrabilt has been an invaluable resource in our process to create practical and meaningful solutions. They continuously go above and beyond to meet our expectations. They are reliable, dependable, and wonderful to work with.
—Valerie Juhasz, Marketing Production Manager
Metroparks Toledo
We are outdoor enthusiasts—hikers, campers, cyclists, walkers, sailors, and fishers—who share an appreciation for the out-of-doors. We know first-hand that good information can enhance the outdoor experience and that displays should complement the environment and be built to last.
Having designed signage standards for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. National Park Service, Provincial Parks (Canada), World Heritage Sites in the United States, as well as for neighborhood parks where we live, we founded Terrabilt’s Wayfinding Solutions as a natural extension of our previous environmental signage expertise.
We added signage structures that are “green” manufactured using sustainable materials and a system that streamlines ordering, updating, and maintenance of the signage system. And we placed additional, critical emphasis on the scale of signs and graphics, as well as the use of sign panels sized for ease of layout and placement in a park environment.
Our system designs empower our customers. Terrabilt enables city, regional, and state park systems to plan and manage signage programs economically and efficiently while providing visitors with the best possible experience.
Meeker & Associates, Inc. (now Terrabilt, Inc.) provided full engagement, refined designs and guidance at every step of the APPA sign standards program development. The final stage was the development of a sign manual that included not only signage (design and materials), it also included comprehensive tutorials on creating a sign plan, map making, writing and designing wayside exhibits. They provided an expansive catalog of standard signs and grid formats with instructions on their use.... I recommend Don Meeker and his staff for any park sign program development.
—Gordon Holt, Field Operations Manager (Retired)
Alberta Parks and Protected Areas
Here you’ll find useful articles and white papers to inspire and inform. We are highlighting a recent article—“Informing Trail Signage Design: How to Enhance the Visitor Experience”—which was printed in the Magazine of the Illinois Parks & Recreation (Volume 54, Number 2, March/April 2023, pp. 20-23). You can find a PDF of this article by clicking here.
Don Meeker
Principal, Terrabilt, Inc., and Meeker & Associates, Inc.
Don has worked extensively to create sign systems that improve the quality of the visitor’s experience in parks, trails, and preserves. He has designed park sign standards for the 2,500 parks managed by the Corps of Engineers, a system of sign graphics for National Park Service, as well as for 700 sites within Alberta Parks in Canada. He has designed signage for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and developed signage standards for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. In Philadelphia, he designed a pedestrian guide signage system for Independence National Historic Park, a World Heritage site, and signage standards for other for regional park and trail systems as well. He initiated and was part of the design team to develop the SEGD National Recreation Symbol Signs.
Based on work to improve highway guide sign legibility and readability for the older driver, his firm was one of 130 selected internationally for the 2010 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and, in 2012, his font design was placed in the permanent design collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 2009, he founded Terrabilt Wayfinding Solutions to create an effective systems approach to wayfinding in parks using sustainable products for park signing and providing software tools to streamline program management. In 2020, Toledo Metroparks, his primary development partner for the prior decade, received the 2020 NRPA Gold Award: Top rated Park System in the Country.
Don has received highest honors for his work from the Society for Experiential Graphic Design and was the recipient of the 2015 SEGD Fellow Award. He received two Presidential Design Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, including work placed in the 2013 AIGA Centennial Collection.
For Company’s Awards & Achievements, please click here.
Chris O'Hara
Design Director and Product Development Manager
Chris joined Meeker & Associates as a project designer in 1992 and is Design Director of Terrabilt. His work reflects a career commitment to public design. He was a senior designer in the development of UniGuide Program Standards for the National Park Service. As part of this development, he has created identification, wayfinding and visitor information plans for Yosemite National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, C&O Canal National Historical Park, and others.
As a member of the ClearviewHwy® typeface design and research team, he has been integrally involved in five research studies of the font with the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute and the Texas Transportation Institute.
As the Terrabilt Design Director, he has focused on the development of designs and manufacturing methods for the 19 different structure systems and kiosk buildings we offer. This work includes the planning of an efficient supply chain quality control with a low carbon footprint. In this work, he studied for over 25 years with the late Eugene Avallone, ME, our consulting mechanical engineer, on the mechanical requirements for mounting systems and the use of materials.
Chris designed the Terrabilt panel retention system, which eliminates needless bolts in sign panels and provides a vandal-resistant approach to modular panel displays. Chris has also managed the user interface design for the Terrabilt sign program planning and management software system that is the core of our sustainability model.
Jeff Smith
Production Manager
Jeff joined Meeker & Associates in 1998 and moved over to Terrabilt in 2009. He is a graphic designer and is the manager of quality control and production management. Jeff has been integral to design and production for work with the National Park Service and sites within the Historic Hudson Valley. He was design and production director for both the NPS UniGuide Sign Standards Manual and for the Alberta Parks Sign Standards.
Jeff has also refined our design of readable maps for parks, trails, and preserves. His current work is the management of production for park districts using the Terrabilt Wayfinding Solutions. Jeff was the program designer in the development of the proportion-based grid system for highway sign design. This work provides a uniform way to layout highway guide signs with clean mathematical proportions and insures consistent figure field relationships of elements. This work was presented to and published by the Transportation Research Board. Jeff was the lead production artist in a series of publications illustrating enhanced readability of highway signs for cycling, street name, conventional road guidance and parking control.
Joe Rivers
Software Development and Manager of Digital Applications
Since 2011, Joe’s work at Terrabilt has included website development and general IT work. In addition, he is the program manager for the development of Signfolio®, Terrabilt’s web-based sign planning program management software system to be released in 2024. Building that software diagram required his having to manipulate many hundreds of actions and events in the software design, develop cost calculators for thousands of options, and manage relationship with our software contractor. On the program management side, Joe works with Terrabilt customers to monitor long term quality of our product and programming sign plans into Signfolio®.
As an IT Technician, Joe is proficient in Python, Angular, HTML, and CSS. His troubleshooting skills are well tuned. Joe worked as a consulting programmer/computer technician and as an Audio/Video Technician for LMCTV in Mamaroneck, NY, performing camera and soundboard work part time since 2016.
Carolyn Gould, Ph.D.
Brand Management, Writer, Marketing & Data Analyst, Naturalist
New to the firm, Carolyn is an experienced brand strategist and naturalist, who envisions the parks as natural spaces to explore and learn from. She conducts intercept surveys with visitors, if warranted, creates co-branding strategies, and prepares recommendations for visitor communications at various points of contact. She also researches and develops concepts and design for resource education signing that includes protection of the land, protection of wildlife, and protection of the visitor.
As a consultant, she has wide-ranging client list includes some of the nation’s top brands, like Bloomingdale’s and The Discovery Channel, as well as an impressive array of such not-for-profits as The American Museum of Natural History, The Goldenrod Foundation, Methodist Church Camps, and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. In this capacity, she has conducted branding/positioning studies; developed new business concepts; created multi-level/multi-channel marketing campaigns while providing the analysis of their effectiveness; and provided creative design and copywriting services.
An avid outdoorswoman, Carolyn has served on the board of the Friends of Myles Standish State Park (the oldest state forest in the US) and helped found the Southeastern Massachusetts Pine Barrens Alliance (a coalition serving the roughly 250 not-for-profits service SE Mass, the Cape and Islands working to protect the biodiversity of the Massachusetts Pine Barrens). She is a certified Vermont Master Naturalist and serves as President of the Board for the Chittenden County Historical Society. She also works as a volunteer at Burlington’s ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, an interactive, living museum dedicated to science and nature.