A Brief History of (My) Ambigrams

Well, before I go around dispensing more advice and things like that I'd better post something inspirational: Like how horrible I was when I first started! I'll probably post a bunch of landmark ambigrams too...!

Unlike most people, I heard of ambigrams before I heard of Dan Brown. Of the names associated with ambigrams in order of discovery (for me):

Douglas Hofstadter : Ambigrams -> John Langdon -> Angels & Demons/Dan Brown

Yes, I've been ambigramming before the Da Vinci Code (thus popularizing ambigrams at an extent previously undreamt of) ever came out. In fact, I've been doing it since 2001. Back then, it was a highly obscure (and geekish, I think it still is, cos' I'm a geek at heart) hobby and pretty restricted to a few people. No where as obscure as during Langdon's era though...

I think most people would have found ambigrams this way:

Da Vinci Code/Dan Brown -> Angels & Demons -> Ambigrams -> John Langdon -> Douglas Hofstadter.

I was introduced to ambigrams via a mailing list (I've long since unsubscribed to, but it was a really cool list! They discussed stuff like base-6 arithmetic, some probability, philosophical aspects of religion, some politics, metaphysics, physics, stuff like that etc... In fact, I learned my precalc from there rather than from school.)

Anyhow, after being shown some ambigrams, I was pretty amazed! But it didn't take long (2 days?) before I started trying my hand at some. It was far easier than I expected, though I wasn't very good at it. In fact, my first few ambigrams looked more like in this album.

If you want to see a really obvious example, take 'Dawn'!

One of my first ambigrams:



Redone much, much later (3 months, I think.):



Modified and vectorized, but I wasn't good at manipulating bezier curves (still ain't):



Click for larger

Not being satisfied with my solutions, I learnt to improve by observing other's. I learnt a few tricks (eg mapping more letters into one letter, certain 'standard' mappings of letters (which I have long since outgrown)) that way. After some experimenting and reading up on some related topics (Hint: Besides calligraphy and typography, check out graphology! I don't believe in the personality bit, but it helps me be more aware of how people write. In fact, much of my work is more based on 'write' rather than 'type', probably evidenced in my love of the calligraphy tool. Writing is also far more flexible than both typing and calligraphy, too!)

I initially started on paper. Later, I started doing ambigrams directly in GIMP (which I think is more useful for more organic designs). I started on Inkscape in 2003/2004 -ish.

Some milestones:

Within a couple of months, I soon produced my first good ambigram of the word 'ambigram'. Also the honour of the first animated. Here it is:



Click for animated

My first vector ambigram... 'Pascal', done in Sodipodi, Inkscape's predecessor:



Don't bother clicking.

This was the only one I did in Sodipodi, because sodipodi then was unstable and crashed too often.

I would say my 'golden age' would be in the late 2002- mid 2003 era. A majority of my ambigrams came from that time. Output slowed in 2004-2005, due to JC and various other commitments, and was pretty much restricted to whatever doodling I did while doing homework and during GP lectures. 2006 looks like a good year, but we'll have to see how university and my 'job' goes!