A builder, a race circuit and a steakhouse name.

Red Roof Inn was the idea of James R. Trueman. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, published by Case Western Reserve University, describes him as a Cleveland native, raised in Euclid, who entered the construction business in Columbus and also began driving race cars; travelling the racing circuit, it says, showed him the need for inexpensive lodgings, and he opened the original Red Roof Inn near Columbus, Ohio, in 1973. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1997) adds that the company was incorporated in 1972, that Trueman was a developer of apartments, office buildings and mobile-home parks, and that the opening motel was in Grove City, a suburb of Columbus, in February 1973. The company itself said in a September 2007 release that the original Red Roof Inn opened in 1972 in Columbus; English Wikipedia gives 1973.

The name was borrowed. The Directory says the motel was named for the Red Roof Tavern, a steakhouse in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The roof then became the brand: except in a few places where zoning or building codes interfered, it says, the motels all carried the chain’s signature red roofs. The company promoted its motels with a two-word slogan, “Sleep Cheap.”

Racing ran alongside the business. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says Trueman bought the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and formed the TrueSports Indy car team with the driver Bobby Rahal, whose car won the 1986 Indianapolis 500; the Directory describes that car as the TrueSports/Red Roof Inn entry. Trueman led the company until 1986, when, according to the Directory, a reorganisation he announced named William J. Denk, who had helped him found Red Roof Inns, to succeed him as president; Richard Bibart took charge in 1988.

For its early decades the chain owned and ran its motels itself. The Directory says Trueman had established a policy against franchising because he wanted to control the product, a policy the company only reversed in the second half of the 1990s.

Hit the Roof, Morgan Stanley, Accor and Citi.

Red Roof’s advertising found its voice in the late 1980s. The Directory says that in 1988 the company hired W.B. Donar & Co., a Detroit advertising firm, which produced “Hit the Roof,” a series of television commercials in which the actor Martin Mull ridiculed costly extras at other motels, such as an expensive chocolate mint on the pillow and off-key lounge entertainment. In 1989 the company began renovating rooms and lobbies in older motels, many unchanged since the 1970s, and in 1990 it announced a full-service hotel in Columbus named the Trueman Club, after the founder.

New owners followed. The Directory, citing The Wall Street Journal of November 1993, says the Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund bought Red Roof Inns late in 1993 and took the company public in 1995; Wikipedia dates the purchase to 1994 and says franchising began with a motel in Branson, Missouri, in 1997. In 1999 the French group Accor, which already owned Motel 6, bought Red Roof, and the company later said that under Accor its base of operations moved to Accor North America’s headquarters in Carrollton, Texas.

In April 2007 Accor agreed to sell the chain to Citi’s Global Special Situations Group and Westbridge Hospitality Fund, and on 10 September 2007 Red Roof announced that the acquisition was complete and that it would look for a new headquarters. LODGING reported on 16 March 2018 that Red Roof had announced a new headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, near Columbus, to house its corporate staff, with president Andy Alexander describing it as a way to bring all corporate employees “under one roof.”

The brand also grew into a family of names. Wikipedia says Red Roof PLUS+ launched in early 2014 as a higher-tier extension marked by a bright red lighted canopy at the lobby entrance, that The Red Collection and HomeTowne Studios by Red Roof followed in 2018, and that the chain opened in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2015 and in Osaka, Japan, in 2016.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are motel and economy hotel names: chains of roadside and city lodgings, many of them run by franchisees under a name owned by another company. A brand of this kind lives in a sequence of physical places rather than in a single package, and each place carries the name in a different way.

The pylon sign is one of them: a tall post or panel set beside a highway or an exit ramp, designed to be read from a moving car and often lit after dark, so a wordmark and its colours have to work at a distance. Closer in, a canopy over the entrance, a sign on the building itself and the lobby door repeat the mark at a smaller scale. Inside, the front desk, the key card, the room directory and the linen take the same name into the room. Some chains add a mascot, which can appear on signs and in advertising alike.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners and franchisors, and changes to its name, sign and identity — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From an Old English box to a floating roofline.

The Red Roof identity is an architectural element turned into a mark. In a release dated 22 July 2004, issued from Accor North America’s base in Carrollton, Texas, Red Roof Inn unveiled a new logo for its renovated motels. The company said it was retiring “the familiar Old English typestyle inside a red box with slanted top,” the mark Wikipedia dates from 1973 to 2004, and replacing it with one that “breaks ‘out of the box’” and uses a handwritten typestyle meant to convey more energy and personal attention. Carol Kirby, chief marketing officer of Accor North America, called the update a critical step in the brand’s evolution as its national renovation programme got under way.

The release credited the mark to David Canaan, chief executive of Laurel Group, a brand development firm in San Francisco. Canaan said that the old logo did not reflect the image of the renovated motels, and the company explained the new design element by element: a floating roofline to suggest spaciousness and openness while giving the mark a structure that could stand alone, and a roof symbol to provide continuity with the red roofs of the motels themselves. The new mark was to replace the old one at each property as its renovation was completed.

The rooms were remade again a few years later. AnnArbor.com reported on 15 March 2012 that a Red Roof Inn on Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had been renovated under the company’s NextGen programme, which debuted at a Red Roof Inn in Miami in December 2011, with wood-like flooring, new beds and bedding, new televisions and new bathroom sinks; the company described the look as “stylish, contemporary, residential and welcoming.” Wikipedia says that to mark the brand’s 40th anniversary a semi-trailer carrying a model of the new room toured the country.

For a design guide, Red Roof Inn shows how a name taken from a steakhouse became a building, and how the building became a logo: a red roof first on the motels, then in a slanted box over Old English letters, then floating free above handwriting. Compare it with Motel 6, its sister chain under Accor from 1999 to 2007, and Super 8. For this guide we use roof red, shingle grey and sky white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Red Roof Inn’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.