Optical Illusion

There is a nice optical illusion showing the ambiguity of the way our brains interpret convexity and concavity. An image, especially of some sort of relief, can appear convex as well as concave. The brain usually automatically switches between interpretations when the image is turned upside down. Presenting both orientations at once makes the difference even clearer.

Convex – Concave, Inkscape and GIMP, January 2010

The ambigram above showcases this illusion. Where it reads 'convex' it looks like it pops up from the background, but when rotated it not only reads 'concave', it also seems as if it is impressed into the background. That makes two illusions in one image.

I got the idea for this ambigram from M.C. Escher's litograph Convex and Concave, which is based on the same illusion.

Decorations Can Be Fun

I used to make all my ambigrams in simple black and white. However, lately I have been adding colour and decorations to some of the designs and I'm quite happy with that. This was partially due to the latest ACAC, which specifically encouraged holiday themed decorations. So far I've kept things relatively simple. The following ambigram takes the colours and decorative elements a step further though.

Psychedelic, GIMP and Inkscape, January 2010

Designing the lettering was a lot of fun. The chain solution allowed for some easy letter conversions, so I had a lot of freedom styling the letters. From the psychedelic theme came the idea to give the letters all these weird organic and fractal like ornaments. Naturally all the colours had to be very bright and contrasting to make the experience complete.

The process behind this work was also different in that I used Inkscape besides GIMP. I do really like the way GIMP handles paths and how it can work with both vectors and pixels. Yet this time I had to fiddle with a lot of different shapes and layers, which I felt were managed more easily with a real vector editor like Inkscape.

A New Year, a New Look

With the start of the new year I have decided to improve the blog's appearance, because the default template had started to bother me a bit. So I fiddled a bit with Blogger's CSS and made the layout more effective with only fairly minor changes. The new look puts the side bar and every post in a separate block, that visibly stands out from the background. Another major addition to the design is the new header. I replaced the old caption with an ambigram version, which I hope is legible enough.

Jutt's Weblog (new blog header), GIMP, January 2010

The ambigram features a Blackletter inspired by the Fraktur typefaces. They are generally a less rigid variety of Blackletter and I think especially the capitals are elegant.

I hope to the new look won't cause any trouble. Feel free to comment if you notice any problems with it.

I Wish You All a…

Happy 2010, GIMP, December 2009