Sheba loves cats and cats love, above all, fish. But fish need coral to survive. And that is going extinct faster than the rainforests. The Sheba Hope Reef went live in May ‘21 amidst a daily news stream of destruction and despair, coral reefs predicted to be extinct by 2050 and consumers sceptical about brands “greenwashing.”

We wanted to create visual proof that it wasn’t too late, that damage can be reversed. Our answer was an ambient outdoor placement grown from real, living coral on a previously destroyed atoll. When viewed by the Google Maps satellite, it wrote HOPE large across the ocean floor.

This image received 2.5billion earned media impressions, 1 million people visited it on Google Maps and connected to ShebaHopeGrows.com to discover more.

The Hope Reef living billboard cut through in a sea of hopelessness -a symbol that there are man-made solutions to man-made problems.

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The typography in the case of the Sheba Hope Reef was the design and laying out of living coral letters - using the Reef Star technology as individual pixels. Each reef star is just over 1m wide and hexagonal shaped. Day 1 on site was spent measuring and staking out ropes underwater in a bold, simple font design - chosen to be as legible as possible for the Google Maps satellite passing overhead.

We then laid each reef star so it perfectly connected with the next to give us continuous letters when viewed from either above water or below water, on Google Streetview.

We had hoped that the reef would begin to show up from the air after 18 months. 4 months later, we got the call from Google to say that it was showing up already - legible on their mapping satellites.