Early Ambigram TV Appearance

In 1996, the CBC documentary series ‘The Nature of Things’ with David Suzuki produced a show about Martin Gardner and the people he inspired. In the introduction, Scott Kim drew and displayed his ‘Martin Gardner’ ambigram.

Now, Encyclopedia Britannica has made the episode available for download. The ambigram makes its appearance at the 3:54 – 4:24 mark (warning, large file size: ~110 Mb):

http://concise.britannica.com/new-multimedia/wmv/newdim025.wmv

This website pointed the video link out to me:

http://headinside.blogspot.com/2008/12/martin-gardner-documentary.html

Ambigram Generators

It used to seem like the idea of a computerized ambigram generator was ridiculous- now, not so much. Looking at the recent creation of the ‘Glyphusion’ engine, the results that it gives are suprisingly very nice.

Compare the results given by the very first generator (the AmbiMatic) at ambigram.com, which used a simple letter-to-letter mapping scheme…

http://www.ambigram.com/matic

…to the results of the newest generator:

https://www.wowtattoos.com/wow/generator.php

Of course, not all of the words you enter will work, and the quality still don’t match that of one generated by a human ambigrammist (not to mention the watermark), but impressive nonetheless.

P.S. – As long as I’m giving free publicity- Don’t forget that the ‘ Angels and Demons ‘ movie premiers this Friday!

More Sketches

‘Abstract’ (mirror), ‘Cerberus’ and ‘Galaxy’ (with an invertable treble/bass clef, just to show that ambigrams don’t necessarily have to have letters/numbers). Coming in next week or so- finished versions of these designs (including ‘Mission Impossible’).

King / Queen

A reflective ambigram, and one that went suprisingly without any difficulties!

In other news- I didn’t discover this until a few days ago, but ambigram.com has been updated after a long period of disuse. In fact, it has had a total makeover and is now a ‘magazine’ format, which is updated monthly.

Inkscape

This is a useful art tool I found out about last year- Inkscape is a freeware vector-editing program, which is useful for getting those smooth curves which are common in most ambigrams.

Images can be created from scratch (like my ‘Prince’ ambigram) or you can use the Trace Bitmap function to smooth out hand-drawn designs (which was done for my ‘WordPress’ ambigram). I have found it invaluable, since I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler.

http://www.inkscape.org/

‘Mission Impossible’ Draft

Made after the realization of the double ‘s’s in both words. One interesting problem is the second ‘i’- the best place to put it is to ‘hide’ it in the serif of the ‘s’. Things like this make it nearly impossible to have a predetermined lettering style- the symmetry always determines the font.

WordPress Ambigram

This is where I will be posting various ambigram designs, as well as the process that goes into them.

There are many pages like this one sprouting up all over the internet as the popularity of ambigrams grow (especially now, with the soon-to-be-released Angels and Demons movie), so I finally decided to join in. Any feedback would be appreciated.

This first post is aptly a ‘WordPress’ ambigram. Most parts were easy to figure out, but the W/ss was a problem. Cursive-type ‘s’s were the solution, although care needs to be taken to prevent it from being read as ‘WordPrem’. Fortunately, context helps in its readability.