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Friday, April 18, 2008

Commercialized Clouds


"QUANTUM SHOT" #407
link



Lucy in the Sky, with Logotypes

Flogos will take your marketing to the skies, and then some. It'll shape your logotype into a "cloudy" mixture of soap-based foam and helium - and send it off to drift for miles, as high as 6 kilometers up - a "wolf of commercialism" in fluffy sheep clothing.

Any form can be made (of any color) and almost any specified location covered. The company seems to maintain that "flogo" shapes are environmentally friendly (they just evaporate after a while, and airplanes will fly through them like through any cloud)




There are definitely some enticing possibilities; for example, instead of displaying Apple logo inside a store window "prison" -


(image credit: Cyndy Sims Parr)

... Flogo will make it soar among the clouds, easily promoting such products as "Macbook Air":




What next? Well, maybe even the air around you one day will be considered as a potential "hologram real estate"... and then you'll have to sign up with certain brands, just to use your personal space, ad-free.


Cloud shapes used to be = Photoshop

"Flogo" shapes, invented by Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover, are really a logical extension of "cloud-vertising" that has been percolating in graphic design circles for some time. It's safe to say that many designers, when seeing a stock image like this:



will immediately reach to open Photoshop to start modifying the middle cloud into whatever the logo they have in mind. Here is a pretty neat example:


(image credit: jciv)


There are, of course, many "sky writer" services, that will spell any text from an airplane - but these will be unstable, blurry and easily dissipating shapes. Flogo will create a much sharper shape - and many corporations seem to be ready to try that style:



Aer Lingus PLC advertisement featured a cloudy shamrock shape:


(image credit: irishair350xwb)

Now you can have ten thousand of these little shamrocks floating into your open window at breakfast... there is something of Philip K. Dick paranoia in the idea of sky-vertising gone wrong.


Cloud-branding opens all kinds of possibilities.

Imagine sending your "letters" into a beautiful sky like this - then you can get free "golden lining" under your message:


(image credit: Raoul Pop)


Or launch some star shapes into this interesting striped cloud pattern (formed naturally over the Okhotsk Sea):


(image credit: PinkTentacle)

The Russians will wake up one day to see an enormous American Flag floating all over their Northern territories (hope there'll be no trigger-happy "Dr. Strangelove" types among their military)

These "cloud streets", spotted near Hokkaido, are actually a variety of the "morning glory" clouds, often observed in Northern Australia:



The image above is quite awesome in its own way - Nature always seem to ace even the best of human creativity...

Sometimes there are "cloud messages" in the sky that are hard to ignore:
(This fantastic formation appeared over Soverato, in Southern Italy; see more extreme clouds here)


(image credit: Gregory Varano)

Or check out this "dragon" natural cloud shape, spotted over Monument Rocks Natural Area in Kansas:


(image credit: Rob Graham)

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5 Comments:

Anonymous Alex said...

Ads in the air, using artificial clouds? Just no. Don't. Bury it in some cellar archive and never think about this again, dear companies. Plus, helium? Helium is way more serious as a contributor to the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide. So: double don't!

___  
Anonymous Miss Universe said...

Wished we had known you were doing this piece.

We have some photos of an ad campaign that features women's silhouettes as clouds

___  
Blogger Avi Abrams said...

You can send them our way, we'll update with your credit. Thanks!

___  
Anonymous Justin Smith said...

I'd be interested to know where Alex is getting his information. Helium is a noble gas and as such, rarely reacts with anything. It also does not accumulate in the atmosphere (despite large scale manufacture) like carbon dioxide. The only danger of helium is an extended period of breathing pure helium can quickly result in death due to oxygen starvation.

As for a the clouds, it's a great example of lateral thinking and hopefully will make its creator quite wealthy.

___  
Anonymous 256 said...

Helium foam as (basically) a temporary lighter-than-air aircraft is a really interesting idea! Depending on how easy it is to transport the equipment for making it, how easy it is to create a viable shape, lifting power per volume, etc. this idea might have many more uses than just advertising stunts.

I also have to wonder how a client would feel if they shelled out for, say, a giant Swoosh logo over London, but then found that it had blown out down the Thames estuary before anyone saw it...

And I agree with Mr Smith on the improbability of helium being a greenhouse gas. I certainly can't find anything to support the claim, anyway.

___  

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    I think not

    Political inclinations aside, great blog post Avi
    Read more

  • Hey Dexter, I come from a socialist society and I can tell you that I wish for nothing else then socialism to make a comeback

    You can blame communism for all of humanity's woes if you want, but I know that it is in the nature of individual humans to be corrupted by power

    Any society that elects a dictator is going to suffer, no matter how good his original intentions were. Look at Stalin and Lenin, they tried to make a better world for the working class, but they got corrupted by power and did some really sick things

    Now I ask you, is capitalism better? Without democracy, capitalism would be an Orwellian terror. Without democracy in America, how many people could the American army kill in the name of a dictator before someone stopped them? Horror. Keep in mind that Germany killed 60 million with an army that is no bigger then today, all because of a dictator.

    Now consider this... How far would the Soviet Union get, if only they were led by a democratically elected leader that changed every 4-8 years? How far would they get with a triumvirate of opposing opinions, a council, senate, anything that did not focus power on one individual for any length of time...

    The countries that were once part of the Soviet Union can now barely keep their people fed, considered third world, developing nations, where they once dreamed of space stations and colonies on the Moon, Venus and Mars; A people of great imagination, initiative and intelligence no longer focused on the glory of humanity but on who has the most money. So are they better off with capitalism?

    I think not

    Political inclinations aside, great blog post Avi
    Read more

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