Lately I haven't spent much time designing ambigrams. The only one I made last month was my submission for the ACAC. What I am going to do now is show a few older ambigrams, which had not appeared on this blog yet. You may have seen them on my DeviantArt or Flickr galleries though.
Deadly Rooms of Death, GIMP, November 2008
Deadly Rooms of Death, which is usually abbreviated to DROD, is the name of my favorite puzzle game series made by Caravel Games. This is not a gaming blog, so I will not go into further detail, but I recommend anyone interested in puzzle games to take a look at the official site at caravelgames.com.
This ambigram is actually the oldest one I fully made with GIMP. Some strokes are not perfectly fluent and since this first attempt I have learned quite a bit about how to handle the curves. Still it marks an important step forward in the way I made ambigrams. Compared to my early adventures in paint this is a great deal more sophisticated.
I am also quite pleased how this particular ambigram turned out. The 'ae' in both the first and the last word simply begged to be mapped to each other, but that also forced the trickier D-th combination and the even harder D-dly conversion. Especially the latter looks complex, but is hopefully still readable. Luckily the central 'Rooms of' part was more straightforward.
Avatar, GIMP, July 2009
The avatar ambigram was mostly an experiment to see how a new A-T solution worked out. Since the v-a was also trivial in capitals, I aimed for an all caps ambigram. This led me to discovering another a-r solution as well.
I am however a bit uncomfortable with the letter spacing on this one. I cannot get the initial A and V much closer together without them overlapping. That means there will always be a relatively large triangular area of whitespace between the letters. On the other hand, the four letters in the middle could be packed a lot tighter, but doing so seems to clash with the much wider space between the first two (and last two) letters. Therefore it seems I am stuck with an oddly wide spaced ambigram.
Maurits Cornelis Escher, GIMP, July 2009
Sometimes you discover a conversion between letters, but you do not actually use it until much later. The M-R glyph in this ambigram is one such discovery I made a long time before it got implemented. This ambigram is the full name of the Dutch graphic artist whom most know only by his last name. Being a long time fan of Escher's work it was only logical that sooner or later I would try my hand at this ambigram.
Ambigram, GIMP, July 2009
Of which word have been made the most ambigrams? Although it's probably impossible to give a definitive answer, the word ambigram itself would be a good bet. Almost every artist has made their own version and many different solutions have been found. This makes it difficult to come up with something new, so I cannot be sure my approach is original. I have not seen an all caps solution before though.
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