The fact they they still look amazingly futuristic today gives some idea how they must have seemed when they first appeared in the 1950s. To many people at the time, this was the iconic image of what a bomber looked like:

Now imagine how people must have felt when this came screaming over their heads:

At that time they were painted in bright white too, to reflect some of the heat from a nuclear detonation, with the familiar red white and blue roundels lightened to pink and baby blue to stop roundel shaped holes being burnt into the aircraft.

I think mindset of the men who flew these white behemoths is fascinating. Set on alert, awaiting the order for a counter-strike, knowing they probably didn’t have a great chance of survival, and even if they lived, who knew the horrors that awaited them back home. Sitting in their huge planes, looking out of tiny windows, carrying a nuclear missile so big it had to be strapped to the outside.

Anyway enough of the history lesson, there were some designy things that inspired me to write this. I came across the Flight Global archive which has scans of their old issues throughout the century, including adverts. I’m not sure entirely who they were aimed at, but I love combination of early British modernist graphic design and modernist aircraft design, plus the whole idea of branding a nuclear delivery system designed to kill millions of people. Here’s a few of my favourites:

Hi there,

Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I work for [snipped], and we’re making sure design sites in the UK and Italy know about a quirky campaign we’re running to promote the launch of a new creative community of icon designers. It showcases the unusual talents of a very creative dog who writes romance poetry in an entirely novel (some might say downright strange!) way…

You can watch the video here, if you want to check it out:
[snipped]

If you’re interested in running the clip on a commercial basis, we can give you a video player to embed, pay you an initial amount for running the content, and also pay you for each view of the clip in the UK and Italy.

[Some stuff cut out here]

Kind regards,
[snipped]

It’s strange enough that these people even found me when my blog is still fairly young and hasn’t got a great page rank. I searched around and found a few people who had got near identical form letters but for other things. I guess I’m a little naive to think most of the viral links passed my way are ‘genuinely’  interesting or funny things rather than manufactured, but it seems an area that corporations are taking more and more interest in. I suspect there’s not a whole lot of regulation either, compared to traditional advertising media.

It just strikes me as humorous that some people are paid to just send out these emails all day, trying to get word out about their new zany video. Incidentally the video mentioned in my message was about a dog shitting out letters that formed poetry – yeah…

If virals are named because like a virus, they spread by contact from person to person, what does that make viral seeding? Biological warfare?

Edit: now I just want to show my friends the video to prove how strange it all was – arghh I’ve fallen for it!