Ambigram

An animation of a rotationally symmetric ambigram for the word "ambigram". Another ambigram for the word "ambigram". Notice the different letter transformations from the ambigram above. Another ambigram for the word "ambigram".

An ambigram is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction, or orientation. The words readable in the other viewpoint, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original words. Douglas Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a "calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves." Different ambigramists may create completely different ambigrams from the same word or words, differing in both style and form.

Discovery and popularity

Early published ambigram by Mitchell T. Lavin in The Strand, June 1908

The earliest known non-natural ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children's books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of invertible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when turned upside down. The last page in his book, Topsys & Turvys contains the phrase THE END, which, when inverted, reads PUZZLE. In Topsys & Turvys Number 2 (1902), Newell ended with a variation on the ambigram in which THE END changes into PUZZLE 2.

From June to September, 1908, the British monthly The Strand published a series of ambigrams by different people in its "Curiosities" column^[1][2][3]. Of particular interest is the fact that all four of the people submitting ambigrams believed them to be a rare property of particular words. Mitchell T. Lavin, whose "chump" was published in June wrote "I think it is in the only word in the English language which has this peculiarity," while Clarence Williams wrote, about his "Bet" ambigram, "Possibly B is the only letter of the alphabet that will produce such an interesting anomaly."

In 1969, Raymond Loewy designed the NEW MAN logo, which is still in use today.^[4][5] The DeLorean Motor Company logo was first used in 1975.^[6]

According to John Langdon, ambigrams were independently invented by himself and by Scott Kim in the 1970s.^[7] Langdon and Kim are probably the two artists who have been most responsible for their popularization, but other artists, notably Robert Petrick, who designed the Angel logo, claim to be independent inventors.

The earliest known published reference to the term "ambigram" was by Hofstadter, who attributed the origin of the word to conversations among a small group of friends during 1983–1984. The original 1979 edition of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach featured two 3-D ambigrams on the cover.

Ambigrams became more popular as a result of Dan Brown incorporating them into the plot of his bestseller, Angels & Demons; Langdon produced ambigrams that were used for the book cover, and a link to his website from Brown's meant he was "suddenly inundated" with commissions.^[7] Brown used the name Robert Langdon for the hero in his novels as an homage to John Langdon.^[8]

Today, ambigrams are available on a variety of products and have become popular for tattoos^{[citation needed]}.

Other names

Ambigrams have been referred to by other terms, including: 'vertical palindromes' (1965) ^[9], 'designatures' (1979) ^[10], and 'inversions' (1980) ^[11].

Ambigram types

A rotational ambigram for the word "Vegas"

A mirror-image ambigram for the word "Wiki"

A 3-Dimensional ambigram of the letters A, B and C

Perceptual shift ambigram by Douglas Hofstadter as play on the Wave–particle duality of light, shown here with strokes that vary in thickness to shift emphasis between the two readings.

Ambigrams are exercises in graphic design that play with optical illusions, symmetry and visual perception. Some ambigrams feature a relationship between their form and their content. Ambigrams usually fall into one of several categories:

Rotational 

A design that presents several instances of words when rotated through a fixed angle. This is usually 180 degrees, but rotational ambigrams of other angles exist, for example 90 or 45 degrees. The word spelled out from the alternative direction(s) is often the same, but may be a different word to the initially presented form. A simple example is the lower-case abbreviation for "Down", dn, which looks like the lower-case word up when rotated 180 degrees.

Mirror-image 

A design that can be read when reflected in a mirror, usually as the same word or phrase both ways. Ambigrams that form different words when viewed in the mirror are also known as glass door ambigrams, because they can be printed on a glass door to be read differently when entering or exiting.

Figure-ground 

A design in which the spaces between the letters of one word form another word.

Chain 

A design where a word (or sometimes words) are interlinked, forming a repeating chain. Letters are usually overlapped meaning that a word will start partway through another word. Sometimes chain ambigrams are presented in the form of a circle.

Space-filling 

Similar to chain ambigrams, but tile to fill the 2-dimensional plane.

Spinonym 

An ambigram in which all the letters are made of the same glyph, possibly rotated and/or inverted. WEB is an example of a word that can easily be made into a spinonym. Previously called rotoglyphs or rotaglyphs.^[12]

Fractal 

A version of space-filling ambigrams where the tiled word branches from itself and then shrinks in a self-similar manner, forming a fractal. See Scott Kim's fractal of the word TREE for an animated example.

3-dimensional 

A design where an object is presented that will appear to read several letters or words when viewed from different angles. Such designs can be generated using constructive solid geometry.

Perceptual shift (also called an oscillation) 

A design with no symmetry but can be read as two different words depending on how the curves of the letters are interpreted.

Natural 

A natural ambigram is a word that possesses one or more of the above symmetries when written in its natural state, requiring no typographic styling. For example, the words "dollop", "suns" and "pod" form natural rotational ambigrams. In some fonts, the word "swims" forms a natural rotational ambigram. The word "bud" forms a natural mirror ambigram when reflected over a vertical axis. The words "CHOICE" and "OXIDE", in all capitals, form natural mirror ambigrams when reflected over a horizontal axis. The words "TOOTH" and "TOMATO", in all capitals, forms a natural mirror ambigram when its letters are stacked vertically and reflected over a vertical axis.

Symbiotogram^{[citation needed]} 

An ambigram that, when rotated 180 degrees, can be read as a different word from the original.

Multi-lingual 

An ambigram that can be read one way in one language and another way in a different language. Multi-lingual ambigrams can exist in all of the various styles of ambigrams, with multi-lingual perceptual shift ambigrams being particularly striking.

Creating ambigrams

There are no universal guidelines for creating ambigrams, and there are different ways of approaching problems. A number of books suggest methods for creation (including WordPlay by John Langdon ^[13], Eye Twisters by Burkard Polster ^[14]).

Computerised methods to automatically create ambigrams have been developed. The earliest, the 'Ambimatic' [1] created in 1996 ^[15], was letter-based and used a database of 351 letter glyphs in which each letter was mapped to another^[16][17]. This generator could only map a word to itself or to another word that was the same length: because of this, most of the generated ambigrams were of poor quality^[16]. In 2007, the 'Glyphusion generator' [2], was developed ^[15]. It uses a database of more than 200,000 parts of letters^[17][18], and has two lettering styles drawn by ambigram artist Mark Palmer.

Examples

This section may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. You can improve the article by adding more descriptive text. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (July 2009)

Rainbow ambigram by Douglas Hofstadter

Graphic artists use ambigrams because of their unique symmetry. Ambigrams thus appear in commercial logos, on clothing, covers of books and music albums, and tattoo designs.

Ambigrams feature prominently in Dan Brown's novel, Angels & Demons, of which the first UK release featured an ambigram of the title on the cover. The ambigrams in the novel were designed by graphic artist John Langdon. Since the release of the bestseller sequel The Da Vinci Code, there has been a marked increase in the popularity and awareness of ambigrams, leading to a reprint of John Langdon's book on ambigrams titled Wordplay.

The book, "Body Type" by Ina Saltz features several examples of ambigrams in tattoo form, including several John Langdon designs.

Another example appears in the short story Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges. In this case, the surname of the eponymous main character can be read the same way right side up and upside down.

The following ambigram examples all have rotational symmetry, unless otherwise noted.

Books

• "Abarat," on the cover of the book by Clive Barker. (See on the book page)
• "Angels and Demons," on the cover of the first edition of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, as well as the Illuminati brands in the text. (see on the book page)
• GEB (3-dimensional ambigram), on the cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. (see on Gödel, Escher, Bach page)
• "Wordplay," on the cover of John Langdon's book on ambigrams. The author's name also appears on the cover as an ambigram. (See on John Langdon page)

Music

• "ANGEL" logo[3], on the cover of a 1977 recording from Casablanca Records, designed by Robert Petrick. (See on Robert Petrick page)
• "CiRCADiAN", the logo and cover of 5th PROJEKT's 2006 album CiRCADiAN. (see here [4])
• The Grateful Dead, on their 1970 album American Beauty use a perceptual shift ambigram on the album's artwork. The title can be read as "American Reality" as well as "American Beauty".
• "Paul McCartney", on the cover of a special edition of his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

The DMC logo, a mirror-image ambigram, on the grille of a DeLorean Motor Car

Other logos

• "DMC," the logo for the DeLorean Motor Company.
• "NEWMAN," the logo for the French clothes manufacturer,^[19] designed in 1969 by Raymond Loewy.
• "BLACKSMITH," the logo of Warner Music Group's sub label Blacksmith Records.^[20] (See on web site)
• "EIB", a logo used for "Excellence in Broadcasting" on the The Rush Limbaugh Show.
• "GOES," the logo for NASA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite satellite, designed by Scott Kim. (See on Scott Kim page)
• "New X-Men", the logo for the comic book series
• The title on the cover of the 20th Anniversary DVD release of The Princess Bride. (See here [5], [6])
• The "4S" SUN logo (rotationally symmetric chain ambigram), the logo for Sun Microsystems, designed by Vaughan Pratt. (See on the Sun Microsystems page)
• The "Tyrian" game logo.
• "YOUNGBLOOD," the logo for Youngblood Theatre Company in Milwaukee, WI. (See here [7])
• The Mosuki logo
• "topdot," the logo of Topdot Mortgage.

Ambigram-like logos

Some non-ambigram logos feature ambigrammatic properties, such as reversed or stylized letters, so they are sometimes thought to be ambigrams. The following well-known logos are some examples of some such ambigram-like logos.

• , the logo for the band ABBA.
• , the logo for the band Nine Inch Nails.

See also

• Anagram
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
• Palindrome
• Mirror writing

Further reading

• Borgmann, Dmitri A., Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities, Charles Scribner's Sons (1965)
• Kim, Scott, Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels‎, Byte Books (1981, republished 1996)
• Hofstadter, Douglas R., "Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald Knuth's Article 'The Concept of a Meta-Font'" Scientific American (August 1982) (republished, with a postscript, as chapter 13 in the book Metamagical Themas)
• Langdon, John, Wordplay: Ambigrams and Reflections on the Art of Ambigrams, Harcourt Brace (1992, republished 2005)
• Hofstadter, Douglas R., Ambigrammi: Un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creativita (Ambigrams: An Ideal Microworld for the Study of Creativity), Hopefulmonster Editore Firenze (1987) (in Italian)
• Polster, Burkard, Les Ambigrammes l'art de symétriser les mots, Editions Ecritextes (2003) (French)
• Polster, Burkard, Eye Twisters: Ambigrams, Escher, and Illusions (2007)
• Polster, Burkard, Eye Twisters: Ambigrams & Other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain, Constable (2007)

References

External links

Look up ambigram in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ambigrams

• Ambigrams, Logos, Word Art by graphic artist John Langdon
• Advice on Ambigrams, John Langdon's tutorial for beginning ambigrammists
• Nakul Bhalla's Ambigrams, The Witch King of Anagram on Deviant Art
• Inversions by Scott Kim
• The story of the invertible symmetrical "Angel" logo and beyond by Robert Petrick
• Ambigrams and wordplay by Punya Mishra
• Ambigrams at the Open Directory Project
• Ambigramy a Oldřich Pošmurný - dozens of ambigrams