Fire Escape Plan

Lay escape routes, exits, extinguishers and signage, then export an advisory, standards-aligned per-floor PDF.

The Fire Escape engine turns a drawing into an advisory evacuation plan, aligned with your regional signage standard. See the feature overview for what it can do; this is the how-to.

Add the engine

Open your drawing, add the Fire Escape Plan engine, and set your region (US, UK, EU or AU) in Settings so the right safety colours and compliance wording load.

Place safety symbols

Choose a category from the rail, written in plain language: Fire extinguishers, Alarms & detectors, Exits & escape, Assembly points, First aid, Emergency phones, Fire-fighting equipment and ‘You are here’ & signs.
Tap the plan to place the default symbol for that category - or use the search field above the symbol grid. Searching looks across every category by name or ISO code, so “fire exit” and “E002” both find the right sign without knowing its section; each result is captioned with its category.
Select it to open the editor, where you can:
- Swap to the exact glyph within the category.
- Rotate and scale (0.3–5×).
- Recolour from a fixed standard safety palette, safety green, emergency red, caution amber, mandatory blue, plus neutral charcoal and white. Free-form colours aren’t offered, so a fire-escape plan can’t drift off the recognised safety colours.

The catalogue is 67 symbols, the set that belongs on a building escape and evacuation plan under ISO 23601 (in-house recreations based on the ISO 7010 set, not the official ISO files). It covers the safe-condition essentials - exits and escape routes, assembly points, first aid and AEDs, emergency equipment - and the fire-equipment marks: extinguishers, alarms, hoses and other fire-fighting gear. Rotatable green and red supplementary direction arrows, plus the ‘You are here’ marker, live in the ‘You are here’ & signs category. Placed symbols are drawn at their real-world size, so they scale with the plan as you zoom, exactly like the walls.

Need lifeboat, liferaft, lifejacket or other vessel signage? Those marine evacuation and water-rescue signs now live in the Deck Plan engine.

Draw escape routes

Pick the route tool and tap along the path occupants should take. Routes snap to walls and are colour-coded, use one colour for primary routes and another for secondary. Tap Finish route in the bottom bar when the path is complete. If you switch tools after a single tap, the part-drawn route is kept (with a quick notice) rather than silently dropped, re-arm Route to carry on from where you left off.

Add direction arrows

Drop arrows to reinforce direction of travel, rotating each in 45° steps so it points the way to the nearest exit.

Check your plan (advisory compliance)

Open the gear → Plan settings to see an advisory checklist that flags the obvious life-safety elements before you print an official-looking sheet:

Place a ‘You Are Here’ marker.
Mark at least one exit.
Draw an escape route that reaches an exit.
Mark an assembly point.
Show at least one extinguisher.

The same screen has a Signage standard picker (UK ISO 7010 / BS 5499-aligned, EU ISO 7010, US NFPA 170 / 101, AU AS 2293 / 3745), which sets the safety colours and the printed standard statement (the sign artwork is an in-house recreation based on the international ISO 7010 set, not the official ISO files). Fire Escape is the only engine with its own standard picker. The picker lets you switch standard mid-session; when you next open the plan, the standard re-syncs to whatever region is set in Settings. To change the default for all plans, update your region there.

It also dresses the exported sheet: Document fields (title, site name and address, prepared-by, revision) that print in the header, an editable compliance statement prefilled with the region’s wording (with a reset to default), toggles for the printed north point (plus a rotation slider to align it with the building), scale bar and compliance statement, and a branding logo picked from Photos or Files that prints bottom-right.

This is an advisory aid, not a legal guarantee. The responsible person confirms the evacuation plan and the applicable edition of the standard.

Export

From the ⋯ menu, choose Export PDF… for a vector PDF, one A4-landscape page per floor. Each page carries a red header band (your title, site and revision details, plus the floor on multi-floor buildings), that floor’s plan with its routes, arrows and symbols over it, and a footer with an auto legend (just the symbols and colours you actually used), the region’s advisory compliance statement, a scale bar and a north point. The PDF is the sheet you print and post.

A multi-storey building exports floor by floor - each page shows only that floor’s rooms and the markers on it. An assembly point placed outside the building belongs to every floor’s escape story, so it appears on every page, and the page fits around it rather than cropping it off.

On the free tier, a watermarked sample PDF is available so you can check the layout before committing. To export a clean, print-ready sheet, use one export credit from your credit balance, or unlock full access. Full access subscribers can export as many times as they like.

Tips

Place an assembly point outside the building footprint.
Flip on the Furniture layer while drawing routes to check the path is genuinely clear of desks and storage.
Double-tap a placed symbol to centre it on screen and open its editor; a single tap selects it in place.
Switch the region in Settings to preview the plan under another standard’s safety colours and compliance wording.

Show or hide plan layers

The Layers button (next to the gear) toggles what the base plan shows - Measurements, Doors, Windows, Room names and Furniture - with a text-size stepper for room names. Furniture starts hidden so the safety plan stays clean; switch it on when you want to sanity-check a route. These per-drawing choices print exactly as you see them, and hiding doors still leaves each doorway’s gap in the wall.

Fade the base plan

The engine settings open with a Canvas → Plan opacity slider. Drag it down to fade the static floor plan in the editor so your escape routes, arrows and safety symbols stand out; it starts at 90%. It only changes how the plan looks while you work - the drawing itself and the exported plan are unchanged - and the choice is shared across every overlay engine and remembered between sessions.