Laughing Squid Celebrates 20th Anniversary

Laughing Squid was born on November 16th, 1995. It started off as a small film and video production company in San Francisco that I founded while making the documentary “Alonso G. Smith, A Half Century of Social Surrealism” about the San Francisco Bay Area social surrealist artist Alonso Smith.

In the years to follow Laughing Squid spawned the San Francisco Bay Area events list The Squid List, created a film about Portland Santacon 1996, started a web hosting company, produced a decade of events and launched this blog you are now reading. It’s been a amazing two decades!

Thank you to everyone who has helped support us over the years, including our family, friends, business partners, blog readers, hosting customers, hosting team, blog writers and especially my lovely wife Lori Dorn, who is also a Laughing Squid editor and writer. We couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Here’s a bit of history on origin of the name of “Laughing Squid” and how our company logo evolved.

The Laughing Squid illustration on this is post is our first real logo, which was created in 1999 by my friend Hal Robins, an extremely talented artist and performer based in San Francisco. Hal, who has a background in comics, made this light-hearted logo of a squid wearing glasses who is literally laughing.