Commercialized Clouds

"QUANTUM SHOT" #407
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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)