An Example of Functional Decoration

Another day, another ambigram. Here is one made from a phrase that proved to be just the right challenge—nothing impossible but still requiring some creative thinking for the trickier parts.

Dragon Slayers, GIMP, November 2009

An especially interesting aspect of this ambigram are the dragon tail and sword details, which play both a decorative and a typographic role. They were not just added as thematic decoration, but mainly to help solve some of the more difficult letter conversions in this ambigram. The initial D and S of both words would not be complete glyphs without the the sword and the tail, so here their most important role is to make the ambigram readable. However, at the end of the words they are not required as typographic element and in this case they represent just what they look like: a tail and a sword.

This can be a powerful trick, as it is a stylish extension to the more common technique where flourishes or other abstract decorations are also used as parts of letters. The advantage of actual iconic imagery supporting your ambigram is that it can help define the theme and make people associate it with the ambigram's meaning more quickly.

The design for the other parts of this ambigram was not overly difficult to come up with. Only the g-y combination took a while to modify to my likings. Most time probably went into making the letter style consistent and polishing details. After the vectorizing process I also decided to go for a bit more elaborate presentation, adding the colour details and background texture—seems to fit the ambigram nicely.