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runwayrunway · 9 months

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No. 55 - Finnair [+ Centenary Livery]

So I know I'm in the process of writing a bunch of longer posts and thus haven't posted in absolutely forever, but I had to let something cut the line very quickly because in this case it was somewhat time-sensitive. I've missed the actual date by two months, but if I get in a post while it's still 2023 (...in my timezone, at least, so sorry to actual Finns busy enjoying 2024) I think that counts, and this entire blog is about what I think, so that means it counts.

On 1 November 2023 Finnair became the sixth airline to turn 100 years old, consistent with its status as the sixth oldest airline in continuous operation. I wish I'd started this blog earlier in the year, or prioritized differently, because Aeroflot and Czech Airlines also turned 100 in 2023, but...well, I didn't. You'll probably see them both in 2024 instead. Finnair, however, was requested by @kuivamustekala - particularly their centenary liveries. Requested a long time ago, even. So I'm going to hope that late is better than never and throw Finnair one last birthday party to wrap up 2023 by looking at where they started, where they are now, and what they've been doing to celebrate.

1923: PROTO-FINNAIR

Finnair, obviously the flag carrier of Finland, was founded in 1923, but its first service was in early 2024, using a Junkers J.13 (fitted with obligatory floats, as there were no suitable airstrips in Finland at the time).

image: Joseph Eaton via US Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation This is actually the US license-built version, the Junkers-Larsen JL-6, but I couldn't find any pictures of actual J.13s on floats.

Unfortunately, Finnair was founded under the name 'Aero', which is probably the actual single worst name for an airline I have ever heard. We can jest and joke about things like Jet2 and Fly Air, but I sincerely do not think I have ever seen anything with worse SEO than an airline named 'Aero'. Even for 1923 this was fairly dire - back then, as for much of history, airlines were generally named for the area they served. Aero may have been a private company, rather than state-owned, but that didn't mean they couldn't name themselves for the area they served - private airlines have always done this and still do. Incredibly enough, there was a second 'Aero' founded in Poland in 1925, but that was quickly merged into what would become LOT Polish Airlines, shedding the name like a chrysalis.

Bafflingly, even when the Finnish government bought the airline in 1946 (they still own a majority share of it today) they didn't bother to change the name. They did begin writing 'Finnish Airlines[1]' on the fuselages, but as far as I can tell this appears to have been more of a stylistic flourish of sorts than an actual rebrand, or maybe even a clarifying subtitle on the very nonspecific name. In 1953 they began marketing under the much catchier 'Finnair', but the company remained legally named 'Aero' until literally 1968 and the fuselages still read 'Finnish Airlines'.

image: Finnair An Aero/Finnish Airlines Convair 340, photographed in 1953 in a livery which included both the large 'Finnish Airlines' wordmark and 'Aero' on the tail.

Early Finnair, like most early airlines, didn't have a particularly standardized livery for its fleet, and even where it did it's not very well documented. Finnair unfortunately has some of the poorest documentation for livery evolution of any large airline I've discussed so far, which really surprised me. That said, it's when the name became Finnair that things begin to be easier to find, and so that's where I'll begin.

1968: CLASSIC FINNAIR

This original logo[2], introduced in 1968, was designed by Kyösti Varis - at least, that's what every logo database I looked in said. I actually couldn't find either Finnair or Varis confirming this[3], but I still think it's probably true. Unlike designers like Vic Warren and Lindon Leader, who wrote and gave interviews about their designs for major airlines, Varis appears to have other preoccupations. He is enormously successful and prolific, to the point where his website doesn't even mention Finnair. According to the timeline he provides he would have either been creating this logo freelance or in his very last days at Advertising Agency SEK (probably the latter, since they did the two subsequent iterations), and based on his history as a typographer I think it's safe to say the letterforms are his creation as well. Also according to his timeline, he is younger than Finnair! And we almost have the same birthday.

I like the original Finnair branding. It's not ostentatious, but it's nice and sleek, with that forward slant I love in airline branding and a long unbroken line (both in the 'F' logo and in the even heights of the letters in the wordmark). It looks aerodynamic and the rounded, blocky letters have a hint of that 60s futurism while not being gimmicky. It's kind of incredible looking at it next to the '91-'94 FedEx wordmark, which occupies the opposite end of the sliding quality scale of TRON-looking text. The design as a whole is simple enough to easily reproduce but distinct enough to easily recognize. The shade of blue chosen is a fair bit lighter than the blue of the Finnish flag, but visually pleasing enough. They basically keep iterating on this general concept for the rest of their history, which I think is fantastic - no need to get rid of something that's working for you. It's nice to see an airline not feel pressured to reinvent its logo and livery every 20 years. That's about it for the logo[4] - what about the livery?

As mentioned prior, Finnair's liveries, before quite recently, were very poorly documented. Variants definitely existed between different types and different periods in the company's history, but the broad strokes of the branding seem to have remained almost startlingly intact for around thirty years.

image: Letterform Archive The cover of a style guide from 1985. If it's changed from the 1968 original, I can't tell how.

But I'm really here to talk about one thing: the liveries.

The above image was from Finnair's own archive and was taken in 1968[5], making it contemporary with the introduction of the Kyösti Varis branding, as well as lining it up with the 1969 addition of DC-8s, like the pictured airframe.

For the majority of Finnair's history, their livery is always going to look something a little bit like this. Primarily white, with a thick blue cheatline (in what I call the domino-mask style, where it's vertically centered around the cockpit windows) that lightly flips up at the very end and a blue cross on the tail to represent the Finnish flag.

Finnair says this image is from 1960. If so, the livery was already well on its way to existing prior to 1968, with my guess being that it was introduced in 1960, along with the first jets in Finnair's fleet - the pictured Sud Aviation Caravelle, which pioneered the swept-wing, aft-engine format later seen on immensely popular jets like the DC-9 and Tu-134 - the latter of which was commissioned specifically because Nikita Khrushchev was so impressed with the Caravelle's aft engines and the quiet cabin experience they provided. It's a plane with a lot of unique visual features, featuring a nose that looks almost slanted downwards (a copy of the de Havilland Comet nose), a cruciform tail (instead of the more efficient T-tail used for future rear-engined designs), and triangular passenger windows. Most crucially, though, it was more or less the first short-range jet on the market. This made it perfect for an airline like Finnair, which at this point didn't really go that far from actual Finland.

This 1960 photograph provides a very strong blueprint for what was to come. It's the first iteration of the livery to say 'Finnair' instead of 'Finnish Airlines', and it's introduced a modern-for-1960 single-rule cheatline, although this early version was flipped horizontally, curling up at the front to frame the cockpit windows instead. (I think the white paint also cuts off behind it, leaving the space in-between the cheatline and painted nose blank metal, but in black-and-white it's somewhat hard to tell.) I do think I prefer the modern version. The use of the white downward curve with no blue hemming it in creates a really nice effect where it blends with the unpainted metal underside, due to the metal being right where you would expect to see a shadow anyway. (This effect is why I'm not quite sure where the paint ends on the Caravelle, and am just guessing based on which parts are noticeably reflective.) I definitely prefer the change made to the tail, where the single line of trim at the end of the rudder was replaced with a white canvas for the Finnish flag.

While I do tend to have a slightly pessimistic outlook on primarily-white liveries, I will say that if you're going to have a primarily white plane, and you are the flag carrier of Finland, this is a fairly understated and stylish way of incorporating it. While I probably would have done it on the main body, over where the first set of doors is, instead of on the tail, I think this is far from the end of the world. What they have is a nice, elegant taper where the tip seems to point directly at the tailplane, and it looks neat and intentional. A lot of airlines tend to just awkwardly slap a logo on their tail, which often looks really sloppy due to poor alignment or even just out-of-place entirely, and Finnair avoids that while keeping the tail from being completely blank. Having an element on the tail that's more horizontal than vertical, like the old 'AERO' rectangle or the tail rectangle on the one decent livery Lufthansa ever had.

If you look in the background, you can see that wow has the Olympic Air livery looked like that for a long time! But that's a story for soon.

Additionally, some details were added on the nose. You can see on this DC-8, photographed in 1969, that the nose features an e-girl cheek stamp of the Kyösti Varis logo. Next to it is the name of the aircraft - in this case, Jean Sibelius - in really difficult-to-read thin text. (Finnair unfortunately appears to have stopped naming their planes by the late 1970s, but at one point they would frequently be named for Finnish people and places.) The 'domino mask' goes quite a bit beyond the cockpit windows to create a wider line from the side. I wish that the logo could have been integrated some other way, because the extra little blue thing just looks cluttered, but I can't imagine how they would do it without just replacing the cheatline. I mean, that would have been an option - indeed, it's what I would have done[6] - but assuming that they keep this general look I think the logo just can't fit in on the livery. The engine nacelles, maybe? Though that would still present issues on the Caravelle, where the engines are directly over the cheatlines. I also wish they would have made it a bit easier read the name, because I like to know what the plane's name is - thankfully, some later paint jobs actually do this before, tragically, Finnair stops writing names on their planes at all.

I believe this to be the strongest iteration of the classic Finnair livery, and it was pretty obviously optimized for the DC-8. Modern airlines tend to not bother adjusting their liveries between types, creating some absolute travesties of proportion, but Finnair boldly went in the opposite direction by modifying it for each airframe and yet still having it look worse.

The sharpest deviation arises in the CV-440 version of the livery. This image is from 1971, just two years after the DC-8 liveries would have carried their first passengers, and it's wildly different. The cheatline is lowered sharply, sitting below the cockpit windows and wrapping around to contour the body of the airplane. There's a certain je ne sais quois to the domino mask that I find myself missing here. This design also has an unnecessary second 'Finnair' added to the tail, which kind of looks awkward stacked on top of the existing cheatline besides being redundant, and the Finnish flag on the tail is somewhat awkwardly made free-floating. It feels a lot less sleek and a lot more arbitrary.

On the other side of the plane the cheatline goes down quite a bit farther than on the jet models, probably because they thought it would be a better way of negotiating the Convair's rather bulbous nose, and I actually think I prefer the wide, upturned variant. This version, if anything, is too close for my taste to the livery VARIG operated in a similar timeframe. There are a lot of differences, yes, but in the 70s having one big solid cheatline on a white body and metal underbelly was the equivalent of the Lufthansa Line, so if you toed said line, be it cheat or Lufthansa, you risked becoming easily mistakeable for any airline with too similar of a color scheme. And blue-on-white was maybe the most common color-scheme at the time.

I doubt Finnair shared many tarmacs with VARIG, but here they are with Pan Am, and they could also expect to run into airlines like Sabena, Icelandair, and probably a half-dozen I've never heard of, all competing to be the one the others get mistaken for. It's a tricky position to be in.

I do quite like the livery on the left, maybe even more than the DC-8 one, but I can't seem to find any other airframes painted like this. I'm not sure why this one is.

These images are from 1971 and 1969. They are both the same model of airplane - the Super Caravelle or Caravelle 10B. Their liveries are completely different. And that's just how it was back then - not even standard within the same airline, somehow still trying to stay distinct from dozens of other non-standardized blue-on-white cheatlines.

When evaluating classic Finnair, I have to keep myself tempered in both directions. When I think it's clean and well-proportioned I have to remind myself that it's just a complete nothingburger. When I think it's a lazy and cowardly non-design I have to remind myself that, no, at its best classic Finnair does look like it was designed with some thought, and it does have some traits that feel at the very least interesting enough to merit not being totally dismissed.

But...look, I have to give classic Finnair a D+. Because they tried, and they did something, sure, but it's ultimately not something especially memorable and the implementation is just spotty.

Even given a canvas like the DC-10, they fumbled. The DC-10, in my opinion, was a big test for them. And I do mean big. In the DC-10 is a plane with all the space in the world to add visual elements, and a space where just a couple lines can go from a detail to a fin that towers over anything that isn't a 747, showing off the Finnish flag as if someone had flown it from a building mast. The third engine, which I feel like a lot of airlines really struggle with on the DC-10, gets a nice horizontal line of writing that's not intrusive but helps prevent it from feeling like a giant gap. The wordmark gets larger, is moved forward, gets to really own the space it takes up instead of being squeezed in. And...they made the cheatline just....a really thin flat line that looks bad and stiff and boring. There's nothing setting them apart from Icelandair, and Icelandair's livery from this point in time was so boring that my only comment on it was that it looked like they forgot to paint the rest of the plane. You can do white planes well, but Finnair just really doesn't get there.

...hey, Finnair? You can't just decide to do belly stripes but worse, Finnair, you're literally next door to like two thirds of SAS and that livery was designed from the ground up. They have a couple of near-misses with SAS's toes but this is the one that makes me actually go 'is this allowed?'. It seems to have been exclusive to their late-80s MD-80 fleet, but it's just incredible to me that it ever happened. (That said, those three shades of blue are so nice together and I wish they had ever brought them back. I understand the appeal of sticking to the stark contrasted blue-on-white of the flag, but there's so much potential out there!)

1997: NEW TYPE, NEW LIVERY

I really like the 757. It deserves a better livery than this.

Removing the cheatlines was a very trendy choice to make. This is the sad beast I call the Deltalite - a Deltalike but without the painted nacelles and belly that are usually slight redeeming factors. There's such a beautiful design on the tail that could have been put on the whole fuselage, honestly, and that's sad, but even on the most granular of levels...why keep the little cheek stamp if you have the logo visible on the tail now? Weird choice. Being so desperate to do the Deltalite thing everyone else is doing that you get rid of your country's flag on the tail is just a bad choice of priority, I think. There's not much to say about this. Honestly, I'd drop it to a D-. There's enough happening that it would lose something by being painted into Star Alliance colors, but it wouldn't lose terribly much.

2000: NEW FINNAIR

Oh, Finnair. Why? Did no airline resist the siren song of getting way too into airbrushing in the early 2000s?

Maybe I just have whatever the opposite of nostalgia is for the early 2000s, but this just makes me sad. They've made the wordmark look worse, overcomplicated the simplicity of the logo, and gone ham with the gaussian blur.

Look, it's not all that bad. The shades used on the actual plane are noticeably darker, and the colors at least don't look half bad now. And they've even bothered to paint the engines this time around! But...come on. You've changed 30 years of something that was working just fine for...this? Something which maybe climbs up to a flat D?

The 2000 brand overhaul, including the logo, was done by Finnish agency SEK & Grey. They're nearly as old as Finnair and have worked for brands as prominent as Coca-Cola and Kellogg's, but their about page puts Finnair front and center. They have an entire page describing their Finnair work.

Despite claiming to have included humanity and warmth and movement, I see none of this. I'll admit upfront I generally dislike what's dubbed 'Nordic' design. It's not the minimalism which I dislike but the banality.

What does any of this have to do with Finnair? What here represents the history of one of the world's oldest airlines? What here really speaks to the Finnish people? Why is just designing something generic and making sure it's all crisp (when you're photographing it fresh out of the plastic, before it's been tripped over and stepped on and yanked down staircases and accidentally sat on and stained with tea) considered a substitute for designing something that people will see years down the line and get nostalgic for? I'm nostalgic as hell for Alitalia, an airline that doesn't exist anymore. I still use the bag from an amenity kit I got on Alitalia nearly ten years ago to store small essential things like toothbrushes and medication while traveling, but I wouldn't know it was Alitalia by looking at it, because it's lovely and convenient and ergonomic but it's literally just grey. It evokes nothing, and it doesn't even say 'Alitalia' on it anywhere. Nothing here could ever be considered ephemera or memorabilia. I could steal Finnair's look at the Gap.

2010: SORRY, HERE'S NEW FINNAIR FOR REAL THIS TIME

SEK & Grey gave it another shot. This one's a lot better.

I like the change in the logo, first off. And this, the word 'Finnair', is the logo, but I'm comparing it to the earlier wordmark. 2000's attempt felt like it was taking the original and just trying to sand off the corners to make it more modern, but the 2010 take on it actually shapes each glyph into a neat little space-age thing that creates this curved shape by way of a lot of straight lines, in a way that feels visually pleasing and interesting. I enjoy the square holes in the A and R, the return of the crossbar on the N, and the extreme range of widths which gives the letters a real weight to them. This isn't a typeface - these glyphs exist in the context of the word FINNAIR in this exact configuration and one of four colorways. Finnair does have a proprietary typeface, Finnair Sans, and it looks nothing like this because this is not a font, it's a logo.

I think it is a shame that this is the logo now. I really liked the F. And they haven't gotten rid of it, but it's now been relegated to an official subordinate position, according to their branding guide:

The official Finnair logo is the text version of the logo, and it is primarily used. The F emblem is used as an additional symbol.

Look, I'll always think it's a shame when your main logo is just the name of your company. Some airlines do it, and it feels like an empty space to me. It can be satisfactory but not outstanding. When you start out with a nice little symbol and then take it away, though, I do feel somewhat robbed.

It stings extra because I really like the way the new F looks. It has that long brushstrokey look and it almost makes me think of Hebrew characters. The way it tapers now really adds to the feeling of movement I get from it, and it's a great base for a livery. Now that it's darker, even though this does bring Finnair into competition with airlines like SAS, LOT, TAROM, Lufthansa, and even Ryanair when it comes to dark-blue-on-white, it also contrasts better with the main body, and it's still light enough that you can recognize it as blue. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to know how to integrate this into a livery. Long line for the fuselage, go up to match the tail...

Finnair. Are you serious, Finnair?

Look! I get it! Billboards are in now, it's fine, I get it. it's probably the nicest billboard I've seen in a while, font-wise. It feels comfortable on the fuselage and it feels like it earns the space it occupies. The F is nicely centered on the tail, cuts off at a pleasant point. But...why?

I really can't be too mean about this. I want to be meaner than I actually can justify, because I think if any other airline made their plane this featureless I would hate it but Finnair's billboard livery is actually nice enough and everything is placed well enough that it's not at all unpleasant to look at. It's an acceptable livery. If maybe 25% less planes were basically all white it would shoot up in my esteem. I don't really like the fact that they put the little Fs on the inside of the wingtips of their A350s, but that's really my only nitpick. It's just sort of...bringing a really fantastic loaf of bread to a potluck when you were asked to bring baked desserts. You've done a very good job, but you didn't quite get the assignment.

It's a bit hard to critique the modern Finnair livery in detail because I think it's executed fine. There's nothing really wrong with it except that it has a logo that could lend itself to all sorts of interesting shapes, it has 30 years of variants of a very specific design to draw on, and it's chosen to go tabula rasa just to be all clean and minimal instead of doing any of the interesting things it could have with this new start.

I want to dislike this take on the Finnair livery, but at the end of the day I just don't. I think it's completely satisfactory. A lot of airlines try to get this look and somehow end up seeming cluttered for it. Finnair is one of the only instances I can think of where a white fuselage with just a wordmark has looked okay. It isn't ugly. It hasn't failed at the thing it's trying to do, but I think that it should have tried to do something else.

At the same time, though, this is the most Finnair that Finnair has ever been. The blue cheatline and the Deltalites were stumbling over well-trod ground. The modern livery, at least, isn't sloppily tail-heavy and seemingly thoughtless.

I give modern Finnair a C. This took an excessive amount of deliberation, but it really is...good enough. It's satisfactory. It's fine! I would have taken a completely different direction, but they have done a good job with their sort of lackluster idea. It's alright. We'll check on them again in another hundred years and see where they're at.

2023: CENTENAIRY

A century is a very long time. Finnair is older than my oldest grandparent. Finnair is older than over a dozen sovereign countries. Finnair is older than aerodromes in Finland. It's older than every currently operating airline except KLM, Avianca, Qantas, Aeroflot, and Czech Airlines. As of the first of November, Finnair is in triple digits.

I adore this centenary stamp Finnair has put out, celebrating the long relationship between aviation and the mail. It's not complex, but it's not barren, either. It combines the dark blue of the modern livery with the light blue of the classic one, all with the white silhouettes of airplanes elegantly soaring over an outline of Finland. The outstretched white wings on the deep blue have the grace of a giant fish swimming beneath a glass-bottomed boat.

But of course it isn't just stamps. Finnair is an airline. Airlines do special liveries. Qantas and KLM both slapped a big 100 sticker on an airplane for their big anniversaries. Finnair has of course done something similar.

Three airframes - the pictured A350-900, OH-LWR, and two A320s - OH-LXK and OH-LXM - have had a 'bringing us together since 1923' sticker applied. Matching the rest of Finnair's branding, it's certainly quite minimal, but it's a nice gesture. It's not what people have been talking about. That's OH-LWO and OH-LWP, both A350-900s, who have been given something more substantial to wear.

youtube

I'm going to assume that after its renaissance on tumblr a few years back most people reading this are familiar with the Moomin franchise. I definitely am, because when I was in my larval stage my mother first taught me to read Russian using an omnibus book of Moomin stories. Creator Tove Jansson apparently designed both the shape of the eponymous white critters and the sound of the name Mumintrollen itself are designed to evoke a feeling of softness, and it's clear why these characters are so beloved.

It isn't the first time Finnair, which frequently collaborates with Finnish brands and highlights its Finnish roots, has featured Moomins.

image on left: Antti Havukainen

In the 1990s, the airline first flew a Moomin jet. They had another in the 2000s. Both were withdrawn from service before 2010. It's been a while now since Finnair flew their last MD-11, but when celebrating their 100th birthday, a milestone that the vast majority of airlines will never see, they chose to do it by way of a soft Moomin embrace.

image: Changi Airport

And, I'll be honest, I think it's very sweet. It got an actual, sincere little smile out of me.

100 years is a really long time. In 1923 aviation was unrecognizable. What we would now consider an airliner didn't really exist yet - space for ten passengers, closed cockpits, and metal fuselages were the exceptions rather than the rule, and the Ford Trimotor was two years from its first flight. Cabin crew were barely even a concept. Airplanes, for all intents and purposes, were considered a type of boat. A nonstop flight across the Atlantic was a ridiculous concept. In a report published by the US National Bureau of Standards, it was said: 'there does not appear to be, at present, any prospect whatever that jet propulsion of the sort here considered will ever be of practical value, even for military purposes'. There were no aerodromes in Finland, so a small company called Aero attached floats to a plane just large enough for four passengers and took them from Helsinki to Tallinn.

Look how far we've come.

Footnotes:

[1]: The Finnair website's history page, which I used as a source for much of the background and several images in this post, renders it as 'Finnish Air Lines', but on the airplanes themselves it clearly has no space, so I've corrected that seeming error for them. I don't know why this discrepancy exists, because as far as I know during this period they were marketing themselves as Aero so this text would only have existed on the livery itself. [2]: Actually, I very occasionally see this version where the F logo isn't fully surrounded by the circle and the F in the wordmark doesn't have the rounded top, and I don't know which came first or if the less round version is just somehow...not real? I did try to figure this out, I swear, but at some point I realized I am literally not a professional logo historian, and nobody is going to be let down if I don't brute-force an answer despite not even speaking Finnish, and I should finish writing the post before it's 2024. [3] The closest thing to an official source I can find is the descriptions of two listings for the centenary stamp including a quote from designer Ilkka Kärkkäinen attributing it to him. I don't at all doubt that he did design it, but I always like to find concrete attribution for things if I can and would hate to spread misinformation and the sparseness of confirmation here is something I find very strange. My best guess is that there's plenty of good sources on it in Finnish but nobody has bothered to make it as clear in English. [4] Admittedly this is a stretch, and I certainly don't think it was intentional, but it does remind me of the longship prow used in early SAS liveries. This motif was introduced in 1946 and continued to see use after the Finnair logo was introduced. The overlap is fairly limited in that SAS never used the longship in their logo (...I kind of want to talk about their logos one of these days) and the Finnair livery you'll see shortly doesn't look like SAS's at all, plus SAS has the extra pink on their liveries, but I couldn't get it out of my head that they do look sort of alike. [5] The absolute hero who uploaded it to jetphotos mentioned that Finnair had given him the photograph while planning to dispose of it, and this makes me wonder if the lack of documentation is just because Finnair doesn't hold onto their old materials, which makes me very sad. A lot of companies, more broadly, didn't bother to keep records until somewhat recently, but in Finnair's case it seems to be particularly egregious. As someone literally studying to be an archivist it makes me exceptionally sad to see history lost just because nobody cared enough to preserve it. [6] Maybe they didn't want to look like backwards SAS. Who can say?

#tarmac fashion week #finnair #grade: c #grade: d+#region: finland #grade: d #grade: d-#region: northern europe #era: 1960s #era: 1970s #era: 1980s #era: 1990s #era: 2000s #era: 2010s #era: 2020s #special liveries #commemorative liveries #requests

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indeedseo-usa · 2 years

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#Seo Services For Photographers #Seo For Photographers #Seo Tips For Photographers #SEO Company For Photographers

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ss-tech-services · 20 days

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The Complete Guide to Instagram SEO: Expert Tips from SS TECH SERVICES

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Edit Profile

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High-quality images and video content: Make sure the graphics, videos and the images are of very high quality and are professional. Enhance your visuals and be proficient in branding.

Interesting Captions: There is an important need to include stories that solicit comments from followers. Encourage questions, insights or simply tell them “Let us know your thoughts below!”

Regularity: You need to be consistent in your posts so the audience can remain interested and also let Instagram know that your page is active.

Explore the Trend for Instagram Stories and Reels.

The use of Instagram stories and Instagram reels is fun and advantageous in that, there is incredible engagement with followers:

Stories: When using stories, it is possible to allow the audience to get some insights or updates, use the swipe up strategy to promote your products or even some limited offers. UseRelevant hastags, location tags as well.

Reels: Reels are mostly short, creative, entertaining videos. Use popular sounds and high-volume tags to make your tech skills stand out and appeal to a larger audience.

Interact with Your Audience

Engagement is not one-sided. Engage with your followers by doing the following:

Responding to Comments: Audience participation should always be acknowledged and hence, comments and/or messages should be replied to as soon as possible.

Interacting with Other Accounts: Follow, Comment, Like and Share Other people’s accounts under the relevant niche. This creates networks and expands your reach.

Analyze the Data and Adapt Your Plan Accordingly

Instagram Insights report should be examined periodically in order to revise some of the strategies that may not be working.

Keep an Eye on Key Metrics: Pay attention to important numbers including but not limited to reach, impressions, engagement rate, as well as growth in the number of followers.

Assess Content Performance: Based on the type of content created, a decision should be made on which approach has the best positive impact to make the appropriate change. Alter keywords, hashtags and content types.

Ways to Improve your Instagram SEO

If you are trying to improve on your Instagram SEO efforts, then ensure that you stick to these practices.

Be current: There will always be changes in Instagram strategies and algorithms and therefore it is always advisable to learn what is new and what has changed. Keep trying: Different types of content, times to post, and different hashtags can influence the audience you want to reach.

Collaborate: Extend your audience and enhance your authority by working along with influencers or other businesses in your region.

Conclusion

For business such as SS TECH SERVICES, which intends to expand its footprint on the power that is Instagram, Instagram Search Engine Optimization is a necessity. One can enhance their profile, include appropriate keywords and tags, improve the content of the messages, and actively respond to the audience in order to get better exposure and engagement and accomplish the intended objectives of the businesses. Always be active. Based on your achievements over a period of time, modify your plans where necessary so that you are always winning in this contest.

Keen to elevate your Instagram strategies? Use these SEO tips now, and SS TECH SERVICES will make a lot of difference you’ve never imagined on Instagram!

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fyonnkalnonn · 2 years

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Signalis Plot Theory: Pan/Bi Edition

I checked my initial theory against some details in my note memories of my last save and immediately realized I made a critical mistake. I replayed Signalis. Using my original understanding as a framework, I paid close attention to everything I could comprehend happening in the game. I might still be lacking some context that having read The King In Yellow or being able to read a language other than English would have granted, but here we are. I think anything else that I missed is probably just minutia and nuances. This game is right up there with Silent Hill 2 for me, so I'm sure I'll grasp those in future playthroughs over time.

The original Elster that went on the Penrose-512 journey with Ariane will be referred to as Elster 1, and the Elster we play as will be referred to as Elster 3. Elster 2? We'll get to her.

In the depths of a planet that will one day be known as Leng, an unnamed elder god is sealed with six plates representing the planets of the solar system in which Leng presides.

Centuries, millennia, perhaps eons later, S-23 Sierpinski is founded to mine the bioresonant materials resulting from the dormant unnamed elder god's influence.

Replikas are created using bioresonance to copy a mental profile of an individual onto a body constructed out of bioresonant materials. Replikas are critical to the war effort against the Empire waged by the Eusan Nation.

As a side note, the Empire has machine-servants, which can be assumed to also be bioresonant, implying the Empire has been aware of bioresonance for a long time.

Lilith Itou and Alina Seo serve the Eusan Nation's military together on Venita.

Lilith Itou's military service eventually results in an injury significant enough that she is no longer fit for combat duty. She returns to civilian life, having two twins, Erika Itou and Isolde “Isa” Itou.

After her military service, Alina Seo is assigned to the Sierpinski facility.

Lilith's medical data is used as the basis for the Elster line of Replika.

Ariane Yeong is living with her mother at a remote outpost, leading to her being culturally different from the majority of the Nation. Eventually, one of Yeong's Aunts gets Ariane transferred to a “proper” school, effectively placing her under the oppressive arm of the Nation.

Ariane Yeong acquires a photograph of Lilith Itou and Alina Seo through her friendship with the Itou sisters – she associates Alina with a sort of romanticized escape from her current life by means of joining the military.

Medical data collected from the residents of Rotfront are used as the basis for a number of Replika models, including Ariane. Ariane is suspected of being Bioresonant, and ends up being the basis for the Falke Replika line.

Ariane gets accepted to be a Penrose expedition pilot – a sort of shotgun-blast approach to finding habitable worlds. She escapes the arm of the Nation, but is largely isolated on the journey, except for the presence of the Elster Replika assigned as the maintenance technician for her ship, the Penrose-512.

YURI INTENSIFIES

hey isn't it kind of weird that Ariane is in a romantic relationship with a copy of her high school friends' mom??? best not to think about it

AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES

oh wait that means Lilith and Elster are pansexual icons! pansexual representation!!!

DANCING IN THE GESTALT SLEEPING QUARTERS

oh my god were Lilith and Alina dating???

FALKE AND ELSTER HIGH-FIVE ABOUT ARIANE SNUGGLING

i have decided Lilith and Alina were dating

Penrose-512 does not find a habitable world during its effective operational range. Its radiation shielding fails, and Ariane develops cancer.

Elster and Ariane continue on well beyond the Penrose-512's operational range.

Penrose-512 crashes on an unknown planet due to systems failure, and Ariane is either awake for it, or the cryo system fails on impact. She leaves the Penrose-512, presumably called by the unnamed elder god.

This is critical – the red planet the Penrose-512 crashes on is not Leng, but is connected to Leng via the gateway and/or the island. The unnamed elder god is on Leng, and is likely the source of Sierpinski's bioresonant material mine.

Elster pursued Ariane as in the opening of the game. Together, they flee from the unnamed elder god and return to the Penrose-512.

Unfortunately, Ariane has already been changed, recognized by the unnamed elder god. Ariane loses the ability to sleep under its influence, she is slowly becoming part of it. Ariane asks Elster to kill her. The Leave ending occurs. Elster ends up somewhere on Leng, a significant distance from the danger of the unnamed elder god, before dying. (We find Elster's corpse on the Penrose-512 late in the game that could be the original Elster, but given this would break the rest of the timeline, I think it's more likely just an Elster corpse. It's clear either way that many Elsters have gotten as far as we do.)

Lilith's medical data is lost in the war with the Empire. The recovered Penrose-512 Elster is recovered, and all future Elsters are based on the Penrose-512 Elster.

Second generation Elsters like Elsters 2 & 3 are known to be less stable than first generation Elsters like Elster 1. Like all Replikas, there is a danger that they begin accessing their Gestalt's memories, but they have the added danger of accessing Elster 1's memories.

Falke descends into the depths of the mine and discovers the Plate Door, opens it, possibly unleashing the full influence of the unnamed elder god. Now wholly incorporated with the unnamed elder god, God!Ariane imprints the reality she desires onto Falke. That is, she wants her fucking partner.

Alina descends into the depths of the mine and takes the Plate of Eternity from the unsealed Plate Door. God!Ariane goes “well I made my partner, but I also want to be with her” and imprints herself onto Alina.

Note, given the nature of the unnamed elder god, I don't think Ariane has any conscious input into what God!Ariane is doing. She's just dreaming. It's just very bad when elder gods dream near you.

Given the extreme susceptibility of Adler units to bioresonance, as Falke changes, Adler and the Kolibris come under the influence of the changes as well. Adler's high level of persona stability leaves him largely unaffected, but the remarkably unstable Kolibris start acting like four-foot tall mobile elder god wireless access points.

The Sierpinski crisis unfolds, most Replikas become monsters as their personality melts into being four to six different people simultaneously, and one of those people is an elder god. They all attempt to fulfill Elster 1's promise, but are not coherent enough to identify who, exactly, they're supposed to be killing.

Alina descends into the mines along with all the other Gestalts. Alina, slowly, is changed by God!Ariane into a physical Ariane avatar.

On Leng date 84-21-D, it becomes a stable timeloop. Changes to the God!Ariane persist, as does anything that came from outside Leng (read: Elsters). Everything else resets.

As cycles progress, Adler, Alina, and Falke all begin remembering “the future” (previous cycles).

Elsters, likely under the extremely wide-ranging influence of the unnamed elder god, remembers her Gestalt's comrade, Alina Seo. They track Alina down to the facility on Sierpinski, and go to meet her.

This has happened many, many, many times.

Given Alina remembers an Elster that is not assigned to Sierpinski, it is likely that one of the earliest second-generation Elsters found Alina and completed part of the journey alongside her. An Elster might even be how Alina got deep enough into God!Ariane to escape the timeloop.

Elster 2 progresses through her own version of Signalis, but its slightly less meat-y.

Elster 2 gets the Memory ending. Alina!Ariane does not recognize Elster, and the loop cannot be closed this cycle.

Elster 3 is drawn to Sierpinski.

Incidentally, Isa Itou also makes her way to Sierpinski, but since there's only one of her, we know for a fact that Elster 3's journey is the only time Isa has been present for the loop. She's looking for Erika Itou, I think, but does that make any sense? I'm not sure.

GAME STARTS HERE

Sometimes Elster 3 flashes to the past of one of the principle characters. Not all these flashbacks are characters she is related to – she flashes back to Isa's point of view at one point, indicating both are already under the influence of God!Ariane's consciousness-blending effects.

Isa knocks herself the fuck out by using an anti-material rifle while standing up to kill a Silent Hill 3 monster who was tragically visiting Sierpinski on vacation. This isn't super relevant to the plot, really, it's just badass.

Elster 3 passes through the gate, destroying her body in the process of failing to open the Penrose 512's airlock during the Fakeout ending.

Elster 3 remembers her time with Ariane in full.

Elster 3 is awoken by God!Ariane reaching out to her. She finds herself within the Penrose-512, part of God!Ariane's body throbbing where there should just be Ariane.

Elster 3 will do anything to fulfill her promise.

Elster 3 salvages parts from the dead heavy combat configured Elster 2.

UNREALITY INTENSIFIES

Elster 3 meets up with Isa in the depths and witnesses what God!Ariane does to the majority of Gestalts, what every Gestalt in the galaxy is doomed to if God!Ariane cannot be stopped.

Elster 3 encounters Falke and a boss battle happens. When Falke loses, she surrenders to Elster 3, granting her the identity and memories granted to her by God!Ariane. There is now no effective difference between Elster 1, Falke, and Elster 3. They're the same person.

At the gateway, Adler confronts Elster. Adler seems to think that if this cycle completes, it will likely cause all of Leng, if not the whole solar system, to be consumed by God!Ariane. Adler attempts – and fails – to save the galaxy. Elster, as established, will do anything.

Elster enters the Penrose-512 one last time. Ariane!Alina is now more Ariane than Alina, so she recognizes Elster. Elster kills Ariane!Alina. I would like to think that this ends Ariane's suffering, but there's not much to suggest that's the case. Either way, the Death ending occurs.

Artifact Ending

Elster 3 is the sixth and final Elster to sacrifice herself to God!Ariane deciding that she would, in fact, still love Ariane even if she was a worm. In the wreckage of a dead universe, Elster and Ariane live on together forever. Presumably, the solar system is doomed to be wholly consumed by God!Ariane because of Elster's selfish or perhaps selfless act. If the solar system is doomed either way as Adler suspects... Well, what's the harm in finding joy in the face of oblivion?

#Signalis #Signalis plot #Signalis endings #Super Pansexual Robot: Elster

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