There’s a reason museum exhibit work attracts a very specific kind of production partner.
The timelines are longer. The collaboration goes deeper. Every material choice has to hold up under months of daily public interaction. And the problems you’re solving together — durability, multilingual presentation, interactive elements that can take a beating — don’t have off-the-shelf answers.
Runway to Runway at the Museum of Flight is all of that, turned up. It’s one of the museum’s most ambitious temporary exhibits to date, and their very first to be presented entirely in dual-language format — English and Spanish throughout, with partial presentation in Chinese, Somali, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.
It features over 100 artifacts spanning nearly a century of flight attendant fashion. Interactive displays that visitors are meant to touch, flip, and play with. And a lengthy run through January 2027 in the historic Red Barn Special Exhibits Gallery.
Bold, multilingual, interactive, and built to last. Our kind of project.
An exhibit years in the making — and months of collaboration to get it right.
The museum’s team had been working toward a fully multilingual exhibit for a long time before Runway to Runway became the one.
It’s a daunting undertaking — every piece of interpretive copy, every section header, every wayfinding sign routed through third-party translators and integrated so seamlessly that no language reads as an afterthought. When they decided this was the exhibit to make it happen, the commitment rippled into every part of the project, including ours.
We came on board about seven months before opening, and from the start, the work was deeply collaborative. Pre-engineering meetings to plan the graphics program. Material testing to figure out what would actually work in context. Rounds of collaboration with the exhibits team and external fabricators — because the graphics are one layer of a much larger build that includes walls, casework, artifacts, lighting, and partners all working on overlapping timelines.
The range of graphic applications alone gives you a sense of the complexity: Large-scale wall murals, dimensional cut vinyl and router-cut lettering for the title wall, bilingual section headers, reader rails, printed panels across multiple substrates. Every one of those elements had to work in concert — same visual language, same quality, same multilingual standards — across a gallery with a lot of different surfaces and formats.
The best part of museum work is how the partnership actually functions. Nobody’s lobbing a brief over the fence and disappearing. We’re in the room together, walking through challenges, pressure-testing ideas, and figuring out solutions — because that’s the only way a project this complex actually lands.
When the challenge is "make it unforgettable," you find the answer together.
One of our favorite things about this partnership is how willing everyone is to problem-solve. The creative vision. The materials. The production approach. Whatever the challenge, the conversation is always, “Okay, so how do we make this great?”
The airplane window corridor is a perfect example. Those individually lit, rounded-rectangle frames lining the hallway leading into the exhibit? They’re one of the first things visitors encounter, and they set the entire tone.
The museum’s team envisioned showcasing the windows themselves, using lighting to do the heavy lifting — and it works beautifully. The result is clean, elegant, and effective: each window becomes its own little moment, drawing visitors down the corridor and into the exhibit. It’s the kind of result you get when both teams are focused on the experience, not just the execution.
The headwear display was another creative solution. The exhibit needed a way for visitors to engage with the legacy of flight attendant headwear — from yellow bucket hats and faux fur caps to futuristic clear plastic helmets. Letting visitors try on physical hats would have introduced durability, hygiene, and maintenance challenges that didn’t make sense for a ten-month run.
The solution was more inventive: Print on mirrored acrylic, so visitors see their own reflection superimposed with vintage flight attendant hats. It captures the same spirit — what would I look like in that? — without any of the wear-and-tear problems. A practical constraint became one of the exhibit’s most memorable interactive moments.
The “What’s in a Bag?” interactive was a different kind of challenge. An external fabricator built the structures — acrylic faces with 3D-printed elements forming the outline of a bag, then all the bits inside (passport, phone, personal items) as 3D-printed objects. Our job was the graphic application: vinyl over acrylic, inset magnets, the whole assembly.
When we visited the initial prototypes, we weren’t just checking visual specs — we were assessing how the pieces would hold up under daily visitor interaction and refining the vinyl application for durability and wear. On an exhibit like this, we also plan for ongoing repairs if needed, because ten months of hands-on use means maintenance is part of the equation from day one.
Materials that look great on day one — and day three hundred.
Durability isn’t a bonus feature in exhibit work. It’s the entire game.
Runway to Runway runs for nearly ten months. Visitors — especially the little ones — touch everything. They flip panels. They lean on displays. They put their hands on surfaces that were pristine twelve hours ago. If your materials can’t handle that, your exhibit starts looking tired by month two.
The material testing phase wasn’t a checkbox. It was some of the most important work on the project. Some elements got more durable substrates than originally planned. Others got creative workarounds that delivered the visual punch without stretching the budget. A few took multiple rounds before we landed on the right answer. That’s normal for museum work, and it’s time well spent — because both teams know that even the smallest material decision matters when it’s getting touched a thousand times a week.
Sustainability and reuse factored into every choice too. Metal conduit from hanging banners gets repurposed for future exhibits. The Red Barn gallery uses velcro systems for easy swap-outs. Every material decision considered both what this exhibit needed and what the next one might inherit. That’s a mindset both teams share, and one more reason the partnership clicks.
The install is a choreographed dance. And everyone has to know the steps.
If you’ve never done a museum install, here’s what makes it different from basically every other kind of project: The sequencing.
Wall coverings and murals go in first — before casework, before display cases, before anything else enters the gallery. Then there’s a period where everyone clears out entirely. The artifacts go in on their own, no other trades in the space. Then you come back to finish remaining graphics and final touches.
For Runway to Runway, that meant tight coordination with the in-house exhibits team and the external fabricator building custom display structures. A lot gets built in-house, but for elements the museum’s crew can’t produce — or for the graphics layer across all of it — that’s where partners like us and their fabrication specialists come in.
It’s the kind of on-the-ground coordination that museum work demands. And if we’re being honest, it’s also the kind we find the most fun.
People are taking selfies inside a jet engine. We'd call that a win.
Runway to Runway opened April 25, 2026 and immediately became a destination — the kind of exhibit where visitors linger, interact, flip panels, and then go stand inside a turbine for the photo. The multilingual presentation is seamless. The interactives are holding up beautifully.
And the experience doesn’t start at the gallery door. Entrance tunnel promotional graphics, hanging directional banners, wayfinding signage, and floor graphics are positioned throughout the museum to draw visitors toward the Red Barn — building anticipation for the exhibit before they’ve even walked in.
This is what a strong museum partnerships look like. Not a vendor dropping off prints, but two teams spending a year thinking through materials, languages, durability, sequencing, and budget together — so that on opening day, the only thing anyone notices is how good the exhibit feels.
We didn’t design Runway to Runway. The museum’s team and their collaborators did that brilliantly. We brought it to life on every surface, in every language, with materials built to last the full run — and we had a blast doing it.
Think your next exhibit is too wild to pull off?
Big scope, tight coordination, materials that need to survive thousands of hands, multiple languages, a gallery full of moving parts — that’s not a warning label. That’s a project we want to hear about. We’ve been partnering with museums and cultural institutions for years, and the ambitious ones are always the most fun.
