Washington DC Archives

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

February 28, 2000April 3, 2026

Blueprint Magazine

Blueprint was the flagship publication of the Democratic Leadership Council — the centrist policy organization that defined the New Democrat movement and provided much of the intellectual infrastructure of the Clinton presidency. Subtitled Ideas for a New Century and published under the DLC’s The New Democrat banner, it was a serious policy journal with an editorial roster that read like a roll call of the era’s most consequential centrist voices: senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, and cabinet secretaries contributing to a national conversation about a third way forward for American politics and economic life.

The Bloom Agency was contracted to launch Blueprint from the ground up and manage its full creative production for two years. As founder and creative director, I designed the Blueprint masthead and typographic identity — a confident condensed sans-serif wordmark in cobalt blue that established the magazine’s visual authority from its first issue. I assembled and led the agency team responsible for layout and production, defining the typographic system, cover design language, and interior grid that gave Blueprint its consistent editorial voice across eight quarterly issues. Each cover was designed to carry real visual impact — the Education issue’s bold “adults vs. kids?” challenge, the Quality of Life issue’s full-bleed display type against urban imagery — while the masthead remained a steady, recognizable anchor throughout.

Over the two-year engagement, we systematized every aspect of the production workflow to the point where it could be transitioned seamlessly to an in-house team at the DLC — which it was, as a cost-saving measure after the contract concluded. Launching a publication, running it at a high creative standard for two years, and handing off a fully documented, production-ready operation is a different kind of creative responsibility than a single design engagement. Blueprint was all three.

Masthead Design, Visual Identity, Creative Direction, Typography Design, Team Assembly and Management, Print Production Management — 8 Quarterly Issues

January 30, 1997April 3, 2026

CarrAmerica — Brand Standards, Property Marketing, Print Collateral

CarrAmerica was one of the largest publicly traded office real estate investment trusts in the United States in the mid-1990s, operating commercial properties across major markets including Washington DC, Dallas, and the Pacific Northwest under the tagline “America’s Workplace.” Managing a national property portfolio at that scale requires more than a recognizable logo — it requires a brand system rigorous enough to govern every leasing brochure, every property advertisement, every floor plan package, and every piece of tenant communication across dozens of properties in multiple markets, produced consistently by different teams in different cities.

The Bloom Agency was engaged to formalize, document, and extend CarrAmerica’s existing brand identity into a reproducible graphic standards system — taking a light existing framework and building it into a comprehensive set of rules governing typography, layout dimensions, color application, marketing materials production, and collateral specifications across every format the organization used. The standards manual became the definitive reference for CarrAmerica’s marketing communications: every measurement specified, every typeface documented, every layout grid defined, so that the brand could be reproduced consistently whether the property was in Dallas, Redmond, or downtown Washington DC.

That system was then applied across a sustained engagement producing the full spectrum of CarrAmerica’s marketing collateral. Individual property leasing packages — each one a self-contained marketing document for a specific building or campus — were designed and produced for properties including Tollway Plaza in Dallas, Redmond East Business Campus in the Pacific Northwest, Hamilton Square on 14th Street in Washington DC, and Fairfax Corporate Park in Northern Virginia. Each package carried its own visual character appropriate to its market and property type while remaining unmistakably within the CarrAmerica brand framework.

The floor plan production work was particularly exacting — architectural floor plans rendered and formatted for leasing materials, with multi-tenant layout variations showing different configuration options for prospective tenants. Getting floor plans to read clearly and persuasively as marketing documents, rather than merely as technical drawings, requires a specific kind of visual intelligence that sits at the intersection of information design and brand communication.

The engagement also produced the CarrWorkplaces newsletter system, a seasonal corporate greeting card program, print advertising for available space across the portfolio, and a standardized leasing inquiry response and fulfillment package system — the complete communications infrastructure of a national commercial real estate operation.

Brand Standards Formalization, Documentation and Extension, Graphic Standards Manual, Property Leasing Brochures, Floor Plan Production, Print Advertising, Newsletter Design, Corporate Communications, Collateral Design, Print Production Management