Golden Billboard

Vancouver, Canada; When Brian Dedora first got the call to construct a billboard made of gold, he thought it was a crazy idea. Dedora, a master guilder, crafted the sign over a week and a half from a 20-metre-long  roll of gold leaf.

"When I first heard about it I thought, 'How zany can this be?' and then the more I looked at it, I thought this is going to be very fun and exciting, so away we went," said Dedora. But after building the glowing, 200-square-foot sign that will be displayed near Granville Island for the rest of the week, he’s pretty happy with the product.

A mere 1.98 ounces of gold covered the entire 200-square-foot sign.

"It essentially tells you how unbelievably malleable gold is," Dedora said. "The gold leaf that we are using is less than one 250,000th of an inch thick ... it’s thinner than paper."

The billboard, located at West 4th Avenue and Anderson Street, was created by Rethink Communications, and is intended to advertise the new "Treasure!" exhibit at Science World

When the Vancouver company was researching the scientific facts behind gold, they found one particularly interesting tidbit: two ounces of gold can cover a billboard.

"We thought instead of telling people, why don’t we demonstrate it and pique people’s interest to come to the Science World exhibit," said Carson Ting, the art director at Rethink.

The cost of the glittering, 22-karat sign is estimated at $11,000.

Because of the unusually high value of the billboard, a security company has been hired to guard it 24 hours a day until it’s taken down at the end of the week. After Friday, the billboard will be displayed at Science World.

Photograph by: Andy Clark, Reuters