One of my favorite ambigrams is the title logo from an old 1995 PC game classic, Tyrian. It's so subtle I never realised until a few years ago.
You can find the logo here, along with the excellent soundtrack: https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-...
I’ve played and finished that game a dozen times and never realized this! Thanks!
Love this! My favourites:
The winner of this: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings
And every single submission for this is amazing: https://ambigr.am/contest/duality
Also nice tip: You can click on the image and it will flip it for you. Especially useful if viewing on a computer, and also because some of them mirror instead of flip.
For a few years, many many years ago, I helped build the sites for wowtattoos.com and redchapterclothing.com which uses the artwork of Mark Palmer. He's the real deal! Awesome person too
Back in 2008-ish the site could generate ambigrams for you too. It was powered by an algo that pieced together a large set of hand drawn glyphs. PHP at it's best :D
https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtat...
I really don't understand this site. What is it?
Ambigrams can be read right side up and rotated by 180 degrees (sometimes other rotations also exist). Some of the ones here say the same thing when turned, and some say a different, usually related, word or phrase.
Ah so it's like anagrams
Now the site makes sense. There was no content on it before and no explanation of what the site was. Just a leader board with this AM logo thing...
Edit: well, on reload, it's blank again.
Maybe it's not possible for all character pairs, but we could have a font-face with plenty of possible pairs and render them as ligatures.
AD -> render an A that looks like a D when viewed upside down
DA -> render the same character in the other orientation
Then to use the font you need to carefully construct palindromes out of the supported pairs. Of course copy-pasting this would be a pita, accessibility would be non-existent, but could be fun for print and such.
That probably exists somewhere as software, but probably not as ligatures in a font. That sounds cool.
Would definitely be limiting on which words you could make a readable ambigram though, because many ambigrams rely on letters that aren't one-to-one mappings (one letter becomes two, or letters between letters, etc.)
This is a cool idea!
I was first introduced to Ambigrams many years ago when Scott Kim was working on some game projects with one company I was at and then did the logo for another company.
Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ?
A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.
Image Diffusion models are already capable of this. There was a research paper and I believe model was released as well, which ch generates visual illusions where an image when flipped becomes something else.
Same idea here. A text needs to be diffused from two views until it looks the same but still matches the input. It might already exist.
Edit: https://diffusionillusions.com/
Edit: Ambigram using Diffusion models https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/
Building one is definitely a puzzle. And trying to read it upside down/flipped without actually flipping it is also a kind of puzzle (i.e. like trying to run a compilation in your head, trying to see in your mind first before "running"/"compiling" the program).
They're also like the made-up language from the movie Arrival. You kind of need to know the end and the beginning at the same time.
I wonder how good GenAI is in generating ambigrams. I know they're very good in generating those visual illusions of having a face in a landscape. Perhaps that can be the next "Pelican test" once the Pelican test has been completely absorbed in training.
Related: Ambigrammia
The Sun Microsystems logo is one of the most famous (and my personal favorite) ambigram logos.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_log...
Interestingly, rotational ambigrams can also occur naturally, e.g. “OHIO”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram#/media/File%3AAmbigra...
:-O
TIL or rather today I saw the letters there for the first time. Just thought it was S's all these years! Nice one
up
dn
By the way, I love https://wordgag.com/ - brings me a lot of joy everyday.
Broken website? Just spins forever.
I love the idea but I love the site design even more. So refreshing to see something like this. Simple yet original.
is this supposed to be feed only for ambigrams? or more of a contest?
Ambigrams are a random useless talent I have. I'm able to write backwards and upside down as well for whatever reason. I hypothesized it's because I'm left handed.
That's usually called "mirror writing", but it's a different concept. If you look closely at these examples, you'll see that the letter forms are carefully chosen so that the texts are still readable as normal under symmetry (unlike regular text).
This is done by creating letter forms that can be interpreted as other letter forms under symmetry, similar to the u and n being interpreted as each other's inverted forms. These ambigrammists are making designs in which more pairs of letters have that kind of relationship.
Ha! that was my first dumb idea when i read about your problem as well. Amazing that it actually worked
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