Andrew has worked with the health, education and charity sectors for three decades, designing many acclaimed and award winning public health campaigns, including Liverpool’s first HIV/AIDS materials during the 1980s, when he was employed by the NHS. He now writes about design for a couple of international magazines and runs his own creative studio in Liverpool where he continues to work with third sector organisations, charities and small businesses.
More recently, he took on art direction and design duties the Now+then HIV heritage project with Sahir House in Liverpool. These lottery funded multimedia installations were on public display at the Museum of Liverpool and Liverpool Central Library, and chronicled an important, previously unexplored three decades of HIV campaigning, care and education in Merseyside.
This twenty minute presentation will provide an overview of key campaigns that Andrew has designed with various organisations – from local NHS Trusts, to Barnardos, The National AIDS Trust, World Health Organisation and many others. It was the AIDS crisis of the 1980s that sparked his teenage political awakening as he found himself working in and coming out to an increasingly hostile and dangerous world…
“Section 28, an uncaring government and a sickeningly homophobic media formed an unholy trinity of unpleasantness that made me realise things weren’t going to get better unless we fought for them.
Whilst I was able to help get information about HIV/AIDS out there as part of my job, they felt like drops in the ocean, so I got involved in local activism, attended my first demo in Manchester and helped out with design for a big Section 28 protest event that happened in Liverpool. It felt like we were making a small difference and doing nothing wasn’t an option.
I was a warrior with some marker pens, glue and a photocopier, and around me, the media was using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to vilify and erode our recently gained steps toward equality, and people were dying. It was a literal battleground.
We’ve come a long way in just three short decades and it chills me to see some of the things happening in politics now. We can’t go back, and to quote the first chant I shouted at my first demo in Manchester in 1988 – we’re Never Going Underground.”
Andrew Dineley
Creative Director
Soft Octopus Design Studio
Liverpool
www.softoctopus.co.uk
Twitter: @disheedee
Andrew Dinely is OUTing the Past: Manchester on Sunday 26th February