THE IDEA

This started as a school assignment: create advertising that gave people just enough of a Chicago story to make them want to visit the museum and uncover the rest.

So instead of treating history like a textbook, we treated it like evidence.

We dug into the Great Chicago Fire, the Black Sox scandal and Al Capone's St. Valentine's Day Massacre, giving readers part of each story without revealing everything.

Then we got ridiculously hands on.

We burned paper for scorch marks. Fired BBs into cardboard for bullet holes. Scanned baseball stitching. Layered archival photography with torn edges and aged textures until the ads looked like something pulled from an evidence file.

No AI. No templates.

Although I'm pretty sure an X Acto knife was involved.

Concept Development, Copywriting