Octoblog

With our wiggly tentacles in many places, it’s interesting to reflect on what’s happening on the open seas of creativity. Check out our blog for musings and observations on design related matters and connect with us in the comments.

What’s another year

Eurovision fans were made to wait two years due to COVID-19, but what a comeback 2021 proved to be. As usual, my favourites faltered at the first fence or ended up crash diving into the darkest depths of the final scoreboard, but even these things couldn’t distract from the fun and excitement. This month has really felt like we’ve turned …...

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Liverpool 8 against apartheid

31 years ago today, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. In 1990 the world was a very different place; I was not long into my first job and aggrieved about local and global injustices. I’d just ‘come out’, discovered animal rights and gone vegetarian, there was an unequal age of consent, the AIDS pandemic was raging and Liverpool was just …...

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LGBT History Month 2021

February is LGBT History Month, and at the end of last year Museum of Liverpool sent out an online call for local LGBT personal histories with plans to display a curated range of seldom-told tales of the city in commemoration of the month. The brief was to use visual and written media to tell a personal story about one’s life, to …...

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Hope and resistance

At the start of 2020, Soft Octopus Design Studio was commissioned by Liverpool Hope University to work on a collaboration with Tate Liverpool. Titled Hope and Resistance, the exhibition’s aim was to present the artefacts, stories and artwork of young people living on the Palestinian West Bank who had responded to the question – What do you want to tell the …...

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Linda McCartney Retrospective

Last week I headed into Liverpool city centre for the first time in more than half a year. It felt peculiar. I believe that many of us have now become so used to consuming art in all its forms as an online activity, that it feels genuinely strange to set foot inside public spaces once again. With every show cancelled …...

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Win some – lose some

We’ve all been there… Whether it be waiting online for tickets to become available for a must-see, but massively popular concert, or hanging on until the last second to hit the ‘buy’ button on Ebay, I’m familiar with the rush of adrenaline and excitement that comes from winning and the heart sinking despondency that ensues as someone else snatches away …...

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COVID 19 – Liverpool 15

During lockdown, certain once important facets of everyday life have become trivial and smaller things that may have previously seemed inconsequential have taken on greater significance. Life for us all has changed and a new way of living has become routine. ...

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Facts not fears

With little else to do during a quarantine, almost all of us are moving our social interactions online. Facebook, WhatsApp, Zoom, Skype and FaceTime are the new replacements for catching up over a cup of coffee or glass of wine. The times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan would groan. Somewhere online, I saw someone crudely flip the familiar …...

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Going viral

2020 hasn’t been quite the happy new year that we all wished each other just three months ago, has it? With floods verging on biblical, the realisation that Brexit is a sad reality and now a public health crisis to contend with, can things get any worse? Sadly I fear they can. Back in the eighties when I was designing …...

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