Creative Portfolio - Keith Bloom

January 30, 2026April 3, 2026

Logos and Identities

Identity design is where my instincts are most exposed. There is nowhere to hide in a logo — every decision about form, weight, letter spacing, and concept is either right or it isn’t. The marks collected here span three decades, eight organizations, and a range of briefs as different from one another as their sectors. What connects them is a consistent design philosophy: type-driven, conceptually grounded, and built to work as hard as the organizations they represent.

CubeSmart is the flagship engagement in this collection and one of the most visible pieces of work in my portfolio. Commissioned for a complete rebrand of the national self-storage company, the assignment began with the wordmark — custom-drawn letterforms with proprietary glyph modifications that give the mark its distinctive character and ensure it reads as a composed, unified whole rather than a typeface applied. The cubic icon above the wordmark is deceptively simple — a three-dimensional form that communicates storage, structure, and spatial intelligence in a single gesture. The engagement extended well beyond the mark itself into a comprehensive graphic standards manual covering architectural signage, building facade treatments, interactive advertising templates, and employee uniforms — the full spectrum of environmental and brand identity practice delivered as a single coherent system. CubeSmart remains in active national use today.

Chronology Productions — founded by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Eric Heisserer — called for a mark that could live in a credit reel as naturally as on a business card. The solution draws from the Orloj, the historic astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square, adapting its intricate medieval clockwork geometry into the letter O at the center of the wordmark. Set in elegant spaced capitals with a warm gold palette, the mark feels simultaneously cinematic and timeless — and was conceived from the outset for animation, the clockwork mechanism designed to turn.

Hist1H1e Foundation is the most personal mark in this collection. Created pro bono for a lifelong friend and his wife, the identity supports a worldwide community of parents, physicians, and researchers united around a rare pediatric genetic disorder. The wordmark encodes the syndrome’s clinical name directly — Hist1H1e — with the double helix of a DNA strand completing the final letterform. It is a mark designed to make something invisible visible, and to give a scattered global community a recognizable emblem to gather around.

Vélocity Bicycle Co-op is a passion project and an ongoing one — I currently serve on the board of directors of this Washington, DC-area 501(c)(3) and am the organization’s visual identity steward. The refresh standardized and refined the custom workmark letterforms, and added structural detail and historical depth to the winged wheel mark — an homage to the Campagnolo winged quick-release wheel composition patented in the 1930s, one of the most iconic artifacts in cycling design history. The accent on the é is deliberate, a nod to the French cycling tradition from which so much of the sport’s visual language descends.

screen47.com was a concept ahead of its moment — a user-generated streaming video platform designed in a Netscape 2.0 environment, before YouTube existed or broadband made such a thing commercially viable. The name encodes a quiet piece of chemistry: 47 is the atomic number of silver, a reference to the silver screen. The mark uses an orbital ring system around the numeral, suggesting both planetary motion and the then-nascent concept of content in orbit around a digital hub.

Georgetown Partnership represents the business and civic interests of one of Washington’s most historically distinct neighborhoods. The mark draws its central image from the golden dome and cupola of the Farmers and Mechanics Bank at Wisconsin and M Streets NW — one of Georgetown’s most recognizable architectural landmarks — rendered in a warm gold that references the building’s gilded presence at that corner. The mark speaks directly to the audiences the Partnership engages: city and federal officials who understand immediately that this organization speaks for a neighborhood with real historical standing.

Cavalier Telephone entered the Mid-Atlantic telecommunications market as a competitive carrier in the post-AT&T deregulation landscape, serving neighborhoods underserved by the incumbent Bell companies. The identity needed to project infrastructure credibility and competitive energy simultaneously — the bold italic wordmark with its sweeping red speed stroke achieves both, suggesting momentum without sacrificing the solidity a telephone carrier requires. The engagement extended into award-winning broadcast animation and direct mail campaigns that earned ADDY Gold and Summit Creative Silver recognition.

The Third Way Foundation emerged from the centrist political tradition of the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute — the intellectual infrastructure of the Clinton presidency era. The identity brief called for something that could operate credibly in Washington’s political environment without the visual language of either party: the clean, spaced serif wordmark with its understated rule achieves exactly that equilibrium, projecting authority without ideology.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Identity Design, Custom Type, Glyph Modification, Graphic Standards, Environmental Signage, Illustration

January 30, 2021April 3, 2026

21st Century Consort — Website, Performance Archive, and Streaming Library

21st Century Consort website folio showing homepage, searchable performance archive spanning 44 seasons and 774 performances, concert listings, recordings catalog, and custom streaming audio player designed and developed by Keith Bloom in ExpressionEngine

The 21st Century Consort was founded in 1975 as the 20th Century Consort — the resident ensemble for contemporary music at the Smithsonian Institution. For over four decades, the group has performed world premieres and balanced concert programming at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, under the artistic direction of Christopher Kendall. By any measure it is one of Washington’s most significant serious music institutions — and one whose digital presence needed to match the depth and rigor of its archive.

This was a full technical and creative engagement, carried out as an independent project alongside my tenure at Cisco Systems. I designed and built the site in ExpressionEngine — beginning with version 2.5 and maintaining it through versions 5 and 6 over the course of the relationship — developing the content architecture, layout system, and CMS structure that would accommodate both the organization’s ongoing season programming and its deepening historical archive.

The performance archive is the heart of the site and its most technically ambitious component: a fully searchable database spanning 44 seasons, 183 concerts, 630 compositions by 253 composers, documented across 774 individual performances — all retrievable by title, name, or date, with individual program notes, composer profiles, and concert records fully cross-referenced. Building and maintaining that architecture — and populating it as decades of analog recordings were digitized from archive tapes and other legacy media and added in batches — was as much a library science project as a web development engagement. The physical recordings themselves — 557 DVDs and CDs archived by recording engineer Curt Wittig — are permanently preserved at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland, with the digital archive serving as the public access layer for that collection. The National Endowment for the Arts supported the archive’s development through performance grants beginning in 1984, with a specific grant in 2009 to fund the website itself.

The streaming audio player was co-developed with Pete Campbell, who contributed the initial jQuery and JavaScript assets before I assumed full ownership of scripting updates and revisions. The player went through multiple iterations tracking the evolution of streaming infrastructure — from Darwin Streaming Server through at least two successive IceCast Streaming Media service versions — each requiring the media library and player architecture to be adapted accordingly.

The client behind this project was, in his own way, a perfect collaborator — a deeply technical database enthusiast who shared the same appetite for chasing elegant solutions that’s always driven my best work. Many of the annual media library import sessions happened in cafes and shared workspaces around Washington, two people who genuinely enjoyed the problem as much as the solution. That kind of working relationship is rare, and it produced something that held together through nearly two decades of technological change.

In 2021, the client transitioned leadership of the digital relationship to a new board member who standardized the main site around a WordPress platform. The streaming library architecture wasn’t compatible with the new infrastructure, and the long collaboration concluded. What remains is a record of what was built — and something more than a record. The performance archive, still running on the IceCast streaming infrastructure as originally designed and built, continues to serve the complete catalog of 44 seasons, 630 compositions, and 774 performances to listeners worldwide, long after the main site moved to a new platform. The architecture quietly outlasted the transition.

Website Design, CMS Development, ExpressionEngine, Performance Archive Database Architecture, Streaming Audio Player Design and Development, IceCast Streaming Media Integration, Media Library Architecture, Content Management, Annual Media Library Updates

www.21stcenturyconsort.org

January 30, 2018April 3, 2026

Chronology Productions — Identity System

Some identity briefs arrive with the concept already latent in the name. Chronology Productions — a Hollywood production company founded by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Eric Heisserer — needed a mark that could carry the weight of cinematic ambition, live gracefully in a credit reel, and communicate something about the relationship between storytelling and time. The answer was waiting in Prague.

The Orloj — the medieval astronomical clock installed in Prague’s Old Town Square in 1410 — is one of the most visually complex and historically resonant mechanical objects in existence. Its layered faces track solar and lunar time, the positions of celestial bodies, and the liturgical calendar simultaneously, all through an intricate system of gears, dials, and hands that has been turning for over six centuries. For a production company whose name is literally about time, no contemporary mark could compete with that lineage.

I illustrated the Orloj face from photographic reference — drawing the astronomical dial, the zodiac ring, the calendar face, and the surrounding architectural detail by hand to achieve the level of precision the concept required. The clockworks at the center are a composite of two stock illustration elements, layered and modified to create depth, visual richness, and — critically — animation readiness. Every layer was built to move. The clock was designed to turn.

The resulting mark embeds this fully realized Orloj illustration as the O at the center of the CHRONOLOGY wordmark — presented in two colorways: a refined gold line art version for single-color applications, and a full-color version in the deep navy, warm amber, and gold palette of the actual Prague clock for rich media and full-color contexts. The business card system carries the identity through to print with characteristic confidence — the clock face bleeding full across the card back as a detail image, the wordmark anchoring the front with clean spaced-cap authority.

The PowerPoint deck template completed the system. The engagement was carried out as an independent project alongside my role as a learning systems engineer at Cisco Systems — one of several creative commissions I maintained during that chapter to keep the practice fluid and the instincts sharp.

A footnote worth keeping: the identity work earned a valid IMDb membership for yours truly — a graphic designer’s entry into the same database that tracks every film the mark was built to precede.

Custom Illustration, Identity Design, Wordmark Design, Business Card System, Presentation Template Design

January 30, 2012April 3, 2026

CubeSmart — National Brand Identity and Graphic Standards

CubeSmart didn’t begin as CubeSmart. It began as U•Store•It — an established national self-storage chain with hundreds of facilities across the country. The decision to rebrand, and the new name itself, came from the client. What they needed was someone to make that name into a mark — and the mark into a complete, living brand system that could govern every touchpoint of a national retail operation.

That’s where I came in. Commissioned as an independent project during my tenure at Cisco Systems, this was one of those engagements that demanded the full range of what I do best: custom type design, proportional precision, and the discipline to build a visual identity system rigorous enough to survive intact across thousands of facilities, dozens of advertising formats, and years of operational use.

I designed the CubeSmart wordmark from scratch — custom-drawn letterforms with proprietary glyph modifications that give the mark its distinctive character and ensure it reads as a composed, unified whole. The cubic icon that accompanies the wordmark is deceptively simple: a three-dimensional form that communicates storage, structure, and spatial intelligence in a single gesture, drawn with the same precision and optical refinement as the letterforms it sits beside. The mark was built in both outlined and solid variants, with stroke weights specified to fractions of the cap height to ensure consistent reproduction across every application at every scale.

The engagement extended well beyond the mark into a comprehensive graphic standards manual — the document that transforms a logo into a living brand system. The manual specified everything: wordmark construction and minimum margin rules derived from the proportional relationships within the mark itself; a typographic system anchored by Gotham Condensed Bold for headline use, with precise leading, letterspacing, and kerning values specified for Adobe Illustrator production; disclaimer and legal type specifications; phone number formatting rules; color palette across print and digital applications; and layout proportion grids governing how brand elements relate to each other across every format.

That system was then applied across the full spectrum of CubeSmart’s physical and digital presence — outdoor and large-format advertising, banner and point-of-sale materials in multiple colorway variations, website UI design, and the launch campaign that announced the transformation to the world: “U-Store-It… Reinvented!” — a line that acknowledged the legacy directly while declaring the ambition of what was coming.

The standards also covered architectural signage, building facade treatments, interactive advertising templates, and employee uniforms — the full environmental and operational spectrum of a national retail brand. Every touchpoint, every format, every application governed by the same proportional logic and typographic discipline that begins in the wordmark itself.

CubeSmart remains in active national use today, visible on facilities across the country. That kind of longevity is the most honest measure of whether a brand identity was built to last.

Creative Direction; Logo Design; Typography Design; Graphic Standards; Indoor/Outdoor Signage; Operations Graphics

February 28, 2003April 3, 2026

Catering by Windows — Advertising and Print Collateral Design

Catering by Windows French menu system folio showing high-key food photography, elegant white space grid layout, and warm typography designed by Keith Bloom for their flagship catering menu

Catering by Windows was one of Washington DC’s premier full-service catering and event companies — capable of producing an elaborate tented dinner for 300 or an intimate luncheon for 20, with equal attention to elegance, detail, and the particular personality of each occasion. The brief called for printed materials that communicated that range without sacrificing the visual sophistication their clientele expected.

The Bloom Agency handled advertising, catering menu design, and event catalog production for Catering by Windows’ flagship printed collateral — a sustained engagement across multiple major projects in the early 2000s. The work spans two distinct visual registers that speak to the breadth of the client’s offering: a refined, high-key French menu system built around clean white space, warm typography, and intimate food photography; and a rich, jewel-toned wedding and special events collection anchored by dramatic tablescapes, tiered wedding cakes, and the quietly confident campaign line “We do…” — two words that do everything simultaneously.

Photography direction for both systems was my responsibility, conducted on location in Catering by Windows’ facility showrooms and commercial kitchens. Getting food and event photography right at this level requires more than a skilled photographer — it requires someone who understands both the visual language of luxury hospitality and the specific story each image needs to carry within the larger collateral system. The fig imagery that anchors the French menu system, the candlelit tablescapes in the wedding brochure, the precise arrangement of prepared dishes in the catering catalog — all of it was directed and produced to serve the design rather than the other way around.

The engagement also included a co-branded collateral piece for Catering by Giant — a partnership between Catering by Windows and Giant Food that required a dedicated sub-brand identity and marketing materials carrying both partners’ visual presence with coherence and appropriate hierarchy.

Across both folios the Windows logotype — a custom wordmark in which the double-O carries a distinctive window pane graphic — anchored a consistent brand presence through every format, from full-size event catalogs and multi-panel brochures to direct mail and advertising pieces.

Creative Direction; Photography Direction; Copy Writing; Production Management; Account Executive

January 30, 2003April 3, 2026

Cavalier Telephone — ADDY-Winning Integrated Advertising Campaign

Cavalier Telephone advertising campaign folio showing animated 3D bluebird mascot character, It's All Over the Wires outdoor billboard, Get Ready to Save print advertising, Swimsuit Edition and Catcher Who Can Fly TV spot storyframes, and radio campaign artwork — creative direction by Keith Bloom at The Bloom Agency

Cavalier Telephone entered the Mid-Atlantic telecommunications market as a competitive carrier in the wake of AT&T’s breakup and industry deregulation — serving neighborhoods underserved by the incumbent Bell companies across Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The competitive positioning was direct: the other local phone company, offering local and long distance service at savings of up to 25% against Verizon, AT&T, and AOL. The creative challenge was equally direct: make a challenger brand in a low-interest category impossible to ignore.

The Bloom Agency developed and produced the integrated campaign that answered that challenge — and won an ADDY Gold in the process.

The campaign’s center of gravity was a fully realized 3D animated bluebird character — a concept I developed and brought to life through creative and production direction of a CGI animation partner. The bluebird was the perfect vehicle for the campaign: a creature that lives on telephone wires, speaks the language of the neighborhood, and carries the warmth and approachability that a challenger telephone brand needs to earn trust from residential customers. The character appeared across broadcast television, outdoor, and print in multiple executions and seasonal variations — the “Swimsuit Edition” and “Catcher Who Can Fly” :30 TV spots, the lifeguard bluebirds in the “Get Ready to Save!” print campaign, and the “It’s All Over the Wires” outdoor execution with the bluebird perched on the telephone wire that is, literally, the product.

The radio campaign — three :60 spots titled “Flocking,” “More is Less,” and “Sizzle” — was conceived, written, and produced by The Bloom Agency end-to-end. All three radio spots and the voice tracks for the animated TV commercials were recorded in a single session with a three-performer cast: narrator, player one, and player two. Recording both the radio and animation voices together with the same performers ensured complete consistency across every medium — the bluebird that audiences heard on radio was unmistakably the same character they watched on television. The animated commercials were subsequently composed and produced at a feature film production studio in Wilmington, North Carolina — a facility that happened to share its building with the production sets for Dawson’s Creek. I spent the better part of forty consecutive hours on a couch in the editing suite making sure every frame was right. The bluebird and the Creek, under the same roof.

The Cavalier Telephone logo was also refreshed and cleaned up as part of the engagement — tightening the letterforms and standardizing the mark to perform consistently across the full campaign media mix, from outdoor scale to broadcast lower thirds.

The campaign earned an ADDY Gold Award for Video/Film Effects Animation — recognition for the bluebird character work that anchored the entire effort. It remains one of the most fully integrated campaigns in The Bloom Agency’s history: a single character concept, expressed with equal confidence across broadcast, outdoor, print, and radio.

Campaign Concept, Character Design, Creative Direction, Animation Production Direction, Radio Creative, Radio Production, Print Advertising, Outdoor Advertising, Logo Refresh, Integrated Campaign Management

March 29, 2002April 3, 2026

GATF/PIA — D4D: Variable Data Digital Printing Campaign

GATF PIA D4D Designing for Digital campaign folio showing three variable data poster concepts — Age of Variable Data Digital Printing bicycle poster, It's Not Just Business It's Personal motorcycle poster, and Make Each of Your Customers Feel Like a Star Hollywood Walk of Fame poster — creative direction and variable data template engineering by Keith Bloom at The Bloom Agency

In September 2001, HP announced its acquisition of Indigo N.V. for approximately $882 million — absorbing the Israeli company that had pioneered digital printing technology and bringing variable data digital printing into the mainstream of the global printing industry. Print Expo 2001 was held at precisely this inflection point, and the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation and Printing Industries of America chose it as the moment to demonstrate to the industry exactly what this technology could do in the hands of a skilled creative team.

The Bloom Agency was engaged to create that demonstration. As creative director, photography director, and account executive, I conceived and engineered the D4D — Designing for Digital — campaign from the ground up: a live variable data printing experience in which trade show attendees entered their name at a kiosk, selected one of three custom poster concepts, and received a full-color 11×17 personalized poster on heavy stock, rolled into a tube and ready to take home, printed in minutes on HP Indigo technology. It was one of the earliest large-scale public demonstrations of variable data digital printing as a consumer-facing creative experience.

The three poster concepts were each specifically composed and photographed to accept dynamically inserted personalized names with photo-realistic perspective and distortion — not as obvious overlays, but as elements that appeared physically present in the image. This required precise engineering of what I called type envelopes: carefully constructed zones within each photograph that controlled the perspective geometry and surface texture the variable text would need to match. Getting a name to read as if it were actually stamped on a bicycle license plate, engraved on a motorcycle plate, or embedded in a Hollywood Walk of Fame star required the photography to be built around the variable data mechanics from the first frame.

All three background images were conceived and produced specifically for this project. The bicycle and motorcycle were rented props, photographed in a studio in Silver Spring, Maryland. The Hollywood Walk of Fame star — “Make Each of Your Customers Feel Like a Star” — was shot in the lobby of the GATF building in Alexandria, Virginia, with the feet of one of my art directors standing at the edge of the star. Every inch of every image was designed to serve the production requirement.

The campaign was well received at Print Expo 2001 — but the show unfolded against an extraordinary backdrop. Print Expo 2001 was held in Chicago, and the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred during the run of the show. The exhibition continued, attendees collected their personalized posters, and the demonstration of what variable data digital printing could do landed as intended — but the closing of US airspace in the days that followed left the client stranded in Chicago, unable to return home for several days. It is one of those production stories that sits permanently in the shadow of a larger event.

I was not present at the expo itself. The campaign was delivered into the capable hands of the client team for the show floor execution.

The campaign line was “The Age of Variable-Data Digital Printing” — and at Print Expo 2001, standing at the moment HP was absorbing Indigo and the industry was absorbing what that meant, it wasn’t a claim. It was a demonstration.

Creative Direction, Photography Direction, Account Executive, Variable Data Template Design and Engineering, Dynamic Type Envelope Architecture, Prop Photography

January 30, 2002April 3, 2026

Lightscape Networks – XDM Launch Campaign

In 2002, Morgan Stanley described Lightscape Networks as having “the finest converged product” in the metro optical transport market. What the Israeli-based ECI Telecom company lacked was a US market presence — and a trade show debut that would announce its arrival loudly enough to be heard over Cisco, Nortel, and a crowded field of surviving optical networking startups all competing for a finite pool of carrier capital spending.

The Bloom Agency was engaged to create the launch campaign for Lightscape’s XDM platform — a next-generation multi-service optical switch that combined SONET/SDH, DWDM, data switching, and digital cross-connect functionality into a single compact shelf — at the Optical Fiber Conference, one of the industry’s most significant annual gatherings. The strategic challenge was considerable: introduce a foreign manufacturer’s flagship product to a US audience already deeply invested in incumbent solutions, make it impossible to ignore at the show floor, and do it with the kind of creative confidence that signals a company ready to compete at the highest level.

The concept The Bloom Agency developed was “One Singular Sensation” — a deliberate Broadway reference that reframed Lightscape’s US debut as a theatrical opening night. The XDM’s core value proposition — one platform combining the functionality of multiple network layers — mapped perfectly onto the campaign line, which we carried across every touchpoint with consistent wit and visual energy. The concept was not just a headline. It was a fully produced campaign.

The video component was conceived and scripted entirely by The Bloom Agency. The production staged the XDM hardware as the sole performer on an auditorium stage — a wide-eyed director discovering its capabilities during a callback audition as the scene unfolds around it. Four booth attendant models dressed in authentic Broadway production costumes rented from a Los Angeles theatrical costume house completed the theatrical environment, presenting the hardware live against a booth backdrop featuring the production playing on continuous loop. The concept was fully committed: the XDM was the singular sensation, the trade show floor was opening night, and every engineer who stopped at booth 3912 was the audience.

The campaign extended across trade show booth graphics, print advertising, direct mail, conference collateral, and interactive display elements — all carrying the orange, navy, and black palette and the theatrical energy of the opening concept. The booth number — 3912 — became a recurring graphic element woven through the campaign, turning a logistical detail into a destination marker.

Lightscape’s XDM was, by most technical assessments, an exceptional product. The campaign we built for its US debut gave it an entrance worthy of that assessment. That the broader market battle ultimately went to entrenched incumbents is a story about timing and capital, not about the quality of the work — or the product.

Creative Direction, Campaign Concept, Art Direction, Trade Show Design, Print Advertising, Direct Mail, Video Production, Collateral Design

January 30, 2002April 3, 2026

Yafo Networks — Identity, Website, and Print Design

The name was, by the founders’ own admission, a joke — YAFO: Yet Another Fiber Optic networking solutions company. It was the kind of self-aware humor that signals a technically confident team comfortable enough with the crowded optical networking landscape of the early 2000s to acknowledge it directly, because they knew they had something nobody else had cracked.

What they had was a solution to polarization mode dispersion — PMD — the signal degradation phenomenon that was blocking telecommunications carriers from upgrading their existing fiber infrastructure to 40 Gbps speeds. The alternative to solving PMD was replacing the fiber. YAFO’s hardware and software compensation technology meant carriers could maximize the utility of their current assets instead. Founded in June 1999 by Henry Yaffe in Hanover, Maryland, the company raised $61 million in venture capital across three rounds before its acquisition by Ciena Corporation — a validation of both the technology and the market timing.

The Bloom Agency was engaged for the full creative scope of YAFO’s marketing communications: identity design, website design, print advertising, trade show campaign, direct mail, and corporate collateral — all of it built in the compressed, capital-intensive atmosphere of the early 2000s optical networking market.

The Yafo logo is my design — a lowercase wordmark in a deep cobalt and aqua palette, with an orbital ring element arcing over the o. The ring is a deliberate double reference: to the optical lenses at the heart of the technology, and to the high-speed networking rings the product was designed to liberate. Light moving through glass at extraordinary speed, made visible in a single typographic gesture.

The website was designed in frames-based architecture for Netscape — the production reality of early 2000s web development — with a full site structure covering corporate strategy, management team, product information, a PMD Resource educational center, press coverage, and investor relations. Getting technical depth and marketing clarity to coexist in that environment required both design discipline and genuine understanding of what the product actually did and why it mattered.

The trade show campaign for SuperComm 2001 — Booth 8316 — was anchored by the “It’s Time to Wake Up!” concept, built around the insight that the industry was sleeping on the PMD problem at 40 Gbps while YAFO had already solved it. The campaign extended across print advertising, trade show materials, and a direct mail invitation that arrived sealed with a coffee-flavored scratch and sniff sticker. The concept and the execution were in complete alignment: every recipient who scratched that seal understood the campaign before they read a word. The greyhound billboard composite — an early Photoshop background replacement technique used as a campaign visualization — rounded out the competitive speed messaging.

The seasonal greeting card completed the relationship collateral — a snowman assembled from the Yafo orbital ring elements, wishing clients and partners happiness and success in the New Year with the same quiet wit that named the company in the first place.

Brand Identity, Logo Design, Orbital Ring Illustration, Website Design, Frames Architecture, Print Advertising, Trade Show Campaign, Direct Mail, Scratch and Sniff Production, Corporate Collateral, Seasonal Greeting Card, Production Management

January 30, 2001April 3, 2026

Boar’s Head Inn — Advertising Campaign and Photography Direction

Boar's Head Inn advertising campaign folio showing segmented print ads for leisure escape, meetings, dining, and spa markets — all anchored by the It's at the heart of our charming inn campaign line — creative direction and photography direction by Keith Bloom for The Meridian Group

The Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia occupies a particular position in the Mid-Atlantic hospitality landscape — a AAA Four Diamond country resort affiliated with the University of Virginia, set against the Blue Ridge Mountains, with an Old Mill Room dining room that had earned 16 consecutive Four Diamond awards, an intimate spa, championship golf, and meeting facilities capable of hosting groups that demand both professional-grade conference infrastructure and the kind of unhurried elegance that only a genuine country inn provides. The positioning line said it plainly: a country resort at the University of Virginia. The creative challenge was to make each of the inn’s distinct offerings feel like the primary reason to go — without any of them contradicting the others.

Serving as creative director, account executive, and photography director as a contractor through The Meridian Group, I developed and produced a segmented print advertising campaign system built around a single unifying campaign line: “It’s at the heart of our charming inn.” The line did precisely what a good campaign line should — it answered every question the campaign asked while reinforcing the inn’s essential character with each repetition. Each ad led with a direct question addressed to a specific audience motivation, then answered it with the same quiet confidence.

For the leisure escape market: “Looking for a Captivating Blue Ridge Resort Escape?” For the meetings market: “Looking for an Unrivaled Resort Meeting Destination?” For the dining market: “Looking for an Epicurean Destination?” — with the Old Mill Room’s 16 consecutive AAA Four Diamond Awards doing the persuasion work in the body copy. For the spa market: “Looking for Your Own Personal Oasis?” — accompanied by a $99 Lavender Salt Body Scrub promotional piece that made the spa feel accessible as well as luxurious. Rate promotional executions — Summer Midweek Rates from $139, Summer Sunday Brunch at $49 — completed the system, giving the campaign direct response capability alongside the brand advertising.

Photography direction was conducted on location at the resort — a more extensive production than the parallel Kingsmill Resort engagement, involving both property photography and model setups across the guest rooms, the Old Mill Room dining room, the spa treatment areas, the fireside sitting areas, and the grounds. Each setup was directed to carry the warmth, intimacy, and unhurried quality that the campaign line promised. The photography didn’t illustrate the ads. It was the ads.

Creative Direction, Photography Direction, Account Executive, Print Advertising, Rate Promotional Advertising, Segmented Market Campaigns, Print Production Management