Tag: Outdoor Advertising

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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

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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