Responses by Maggie Winters and Zach Goodwin, chief creative officers and cofounders, This January.
Background: The International Spy Museum’s new exhibit, Camouflage: Designed to Deceive, needed a launch campaign that could drive ticket sales and build awareness across Washington, DC, and keep doing it for years, not just opening weekend. The exhibit explores the wild, colorful history of camouflage through four principles—to disappear, distort, disguise and deceive—and our campaign needed to give people a reason to care about a subject most people think they already understand. The audience is genuinely broad: DC locals, international tourists, families, history lovers and anyone who’d be surprised to learn that camouflage goes way beyond green and brown. As the museum’s creative agency of record, we also wanted this campaign to continue growing the brand and prove that the Spy Museum is one of the most creative cultural institutions in the country.
Design thinking: Camouflage is designed to blend in. Advertising is designed to stand out. That tension was the whole brie; instead of leaning into the expected—muted greens, military camo and patterns designed to blend in—we went the opposite direction. We used bold, bright graphics pulled from actual camouflage history and then hid the subjects inside the patterns, almost like optical illusions.
The first pattern we featured is Razzle Dazzle, originally designed for World War I–era ships to confuse enemy vessels about direction and speed. The second is a custom museum-red pattern designed by its own team. Both feel nothing like what most people picture when they hear the word camouflage, which was exactly the point—the exhibit is full of stories like that, and we wanted the campaign to give people a taste of what they’d discover inside.
Challenges: That tension between camouflage and advertising was so difficult for us during the conceptualization phase. We had so many ideas that involved blending in or being invisible, but we realized that, while those could be cool stunts, those ideas would never break through when it came to an ad campaign.
Favorite details: Every single prop and wardrobe piece in the campaign was hand-crafted and hand-painted, even the shoes with all their little curves. We partnered with photographer Ian Loring Shiver and stylist Minnie Park, and all effects were captured in-camera. It took a lot of experimentation and iteration to get the pattern to read correctly on three-dimensional objects, at the right scale, in a way that actually created that optical-illusion effect when photographed.
Visual influences: The exhibit itself is a goldmine—there are so many incredible stories in there! The story of Razzle Dazzle camouflage, originally painted onto World War I warships in these wild, geometric, high-contrast patterns, was the biggest influence. There’s also a story in the exhibit about Operation Hollywood during World War II, where an entire fake town was built to camouflage military operations from planes overhead. That kind of ambitious, creative problem-solving set the tone for our approach. We also looked at the bold graphic traditions of optical art and poster design, where pattern and contrast do the heavy lifting. The goal was to make camouflage feel exciting and surprising rather than tactical and subdued.
Time constraints: The timeline is actually really working in our favor. With a multiyear exhibit, we’ll have plenty of time to explore this campaign across different mediums; hopefully, we can even add new patterns to the collection.
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