Signarama Brand Guidelines: The Titus Family’s 1986 Sign Franchise & a 2014 Rebrand

A Long Island store, then a second in Palm Beach County.

Signarama dates from 1986. English Wikipedia says it was founded by Ray Titus and his father, Roy Titus, that the original store opened in Farmingdale, New York, on Long Island, and that a second followed in North Palm Beach, Florida, less than a year later. Counselor, the promotional-products trade magazine published by ASI, wrote in October 2023 that Ray Titus launched the sign franchise, which the magazine spells Sign-A-Rama, in 1986 at the age of 23.

The family already knew franchising. According to the same Counselor profile, Roy Titus had been an advertising salesman in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1975 he and another son, Bob, turned Minuteman Press into a franchise company. The magazine noted that the Titus name and the franchise model had by then been linked for almost 50 years. Signarama took the next generation into a different trade: English Wikipedia lists its products as signs, graphics, decals, displays and other visual communications.

The business settled in Florida. English Wikipedia gives the headquarters as West Palm Beach, and Signs of the Times, the American sign-trade magazine, placed the company there in its March 2014 report. Counselor describes the United Franchise Group building in West Palm Beach as the place where the youngest Titus son, Andrew, first worked while still at high school, before moving into franchise development for the group.

United Franchise Group and the next generation.

Signarama became the anchor of a wider group. It is a subsidiary of United Franchise Group, English Wikipedia says, and Counselor reported in October 2023 that Ray Titus, as chief executive of United Franchise Group, oversaw ten enterprises. Among them, according to the same profile, are the promotional-products franchise Fully Promoted, led since December 2022 by Andrew Titus, and the restaurant franchise Cannoli Pizza Kitchen, led by his brother Austin. The group also includes a commercial property business, Franchise Real Estate, which by 2023 was run by the previous president of Fully Promoted, the magazine said. Andrew Titus’s own route ran through the network: after his school years in the West Palm Beach building he worked for a Fully Promoted franchisee in Birmingham, Alabama, while at college, then in franchise development and as a regional manager in Manhattan.

The profile appeared in Counselor’s 2023 Power 50, a ranking of the promotional-products industry’s most influential people, where Ray and Andrew Titus were placed 39th together; the magazine listed seven previous appearances for Ray Titus and credited him with 23 years in the promotional-products trade. The sign brand itself stayed in the family. Counselor wrote that Ray Titus’s son A.J. Titus leads Sign-A-Rama, and English Wikipedia lists Alex James Titus as president, with Ray Titus as chief executive. The magazine describes the business as a family undertaking, in which each of Ray Titus’s three sons runs one of the group’s brands while the founder oversees the whole.

The network is international, though counts vary by source and year. English Wikipedia lists the areas served as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Guatemala, India, Albania and France, and its infobox gives 661 locations, which the article divides into 387 in the United States and 274 elsewhere, with franchises in 13 countries including France, French Guiana and Australia; Signs of the Times put the network at about 900 locations in March 2014. English Wikipedia also notes that Entrepreneur magazine placed Signarama 249th in its 2018 Franchise 500 ranking of American franchises, and that Franchising USA ranked it third among franchises for veterans for 2014–15.

Storefronts, vans and service menus.

Sign, print and promotional-products franchises sell mostly to other businesses, through local centres run by franchisees under a shared name. Their identity is carried less by national advertising than by the surfaces the centres themselves produce: shop windows, vehicle wraps and reception displays. When Signarama renewed its colour scheme, logo, tagline and icon in 2014, Signs of the Times reported that the new look would be applied to exactly those three things across its franchise locations.

The photography such companies publish tends to show the same surfaces: storefronts with the brand name across the fascia, vans in full wraps, and finished signs installed on clients’ buildings, much of it carrying the client’s name rather than the franchise’s own. Individual centres are commonly identified by the town or district they serve, so one national name is repeated across hundreds of locations, and in some markets a network trades under a different name altogether, as FASTSIGNS does in Australia, where English Wikipedia says its centres operate as Signwave.

Service menus tend to be written plainly, as lists of what a centre can make and do: signs and banners, vehicle graphics, interior décor, wayfinding, digital signs, printed material and branded merchandise, often with design, permitting and installation alongside. The menus have widened over time; FASTSIGNS, which began with next-day cut-vinyl signs in 1985, now describes a much broader range of visual communications.

Behind the storefronts sit corporate pages about owners and franchise systems. Some networks belong to private-equity firms and have changed hands several times; others remain in family control, as the Titus family’s United Franchise Group does with Signarama. Location counts are given by date and by source, and they vary, because centres open, close, convert from independent shops or share premises with related franchises.

A new colour scheme, logo, tagline and icon in 2014.

The look was overhauled in 2014. Signs of the Times reported in March that year that Signarama was in the middle of rebranding its roughly 900 franchise locations, with a new colour scheme, logo, tagline and icon, and that it had named Orafol Americas, of Black Creek, Georgia, as its vendor of choice for producing the graphics. Orafol materials were to be used for the new window graphics, fleet wraps and lobby displays across the franchise locations, and also in franchisee training, the magazine said.

Those three surfaces are where the 2014 identity was meant to appear, according to the report: the windows of each store, the vehicles of each franchise and the reception areas customers walk into. They are also among the kinds of work English Wikipedia lists among the network’s products, from signs and graphics to decals and displays.

The spelling has moved over time. The 2023 Counselor profile still uses the hyphenated Sign-A-Rama, while English Wikipedia and Signs of the Times write Signarama as one word, the form used in this guide. Both versions of the name refer to the same West Palm Beach franchise, founded in 1986 and run by the Titus family through United Franchise Group.

For a design guide, Signarama shows a family franchise that renewed its colours, logo, tagline and icon across hundreds of stores at once, and then applied them to windows, vans and lobbies. Compare FASTSIGNS, the Texas sign franchise founded a year earlier, and Minuteman Press, the printing franchise Roy Titus built with his son Bob. For this guide we use a crimson, a charcoal and a warm stone with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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