Cities for the ACAC

The results for the ACAC are in, a few days earlier than expected for a change. As always, the winning entries can be found on the ambigram.com results page. I was surprised most by Elwin Gill's design, a fully hand drawn piece with amazing detail. The following two ambigrams were my own submissions.

Amsterdam, GIMP, May 2010

Naturally I had to do a city from my own country. Since it had to be a relatively well known city, the options were a bit limited; Amsterdam ought to be notable enough though. The design incorporates the three crosses and colour scheme from Amsterdam's flag and coat of arms.

Alexandria, GIMP, May 2010

A somewhat random choice, yet a fun ambigram to make. It was chained to allow for optimal readability. The letters around the x were the trickiest part, but came out pretty nicely. This ambigram also uses my favourite solution for the lower case a twice.

Another Game I Like

Cave Story, GIMP, June 2010

Cave Story is a freeware game, which I played and enjoyed tremendously. It is a side-scrolling platformer game, probably one of the best, presenting a perfect mix of action and exploration supported by excellent music, graphics and storyline.

I am quite pleased with this ambigram design. A crucial step in its creation was choosing the right typographic style. The v-o combination was probably the most important factor that made me select this cursive type. Since the v had to be rounded quite a bit to turn into an o, so a smoothly flowing cursive style seemed to fit best. Some other nice details include the proper capitalization, which is often difficult to achieve in ambigrams, and the baseline shift between the two words.