08/24/2026
A little bit of Kraken Entertainment history… 🐙
When I was developing the Kraken Entertainment logo, I went through a lot of different octopus and sea-monster illustrations before settling on this one. There was something about the movement of the arms and the old engraved style that just felt right.
I didn’t simply drop the image into the logo as-is. I rearranged and repositioned the arms so they appeared to reach around and into the Kraken Entertainment name, then recoloured the illustration in the purple/magenta that became part of our branding.
For years I knew it was an old illustration, but I didn’t know much about where it had originally come from.
Recently I finally tracked it down.
The image appears in the 1857 edition of Worthington Hooker’s The Child’s Book of Nature, Part II: Animals, published by Harper & Brothers. It appears on page 128 in a section called “Instruments of Defense and Attack.”
Interestingly, the book refers to the animal as a “cuttle-fish,” a term that was sometimes used much more broadly for cephalopods in the 19th century than it is today. The accompanying text describes its eight long arms, suckers, and the ink it releases to escape predators.
So the octopus that eventually became part of the Kraken Entertainment logo was already appearing in print 169 years ago.
I chose it simply because, out of all the images I looked at, this was the one that felt like Kraken. Finding out the history behind it all these years later makes me appreciate it even more.
You can see the original 1857 page here:
https://archive.org/details/childsbooknatur00hookgoog/page/n252/mode/2up?ref=ol
