Cairo - City of the Gods

In an earlier blog I mentioned that Ambigram Magazine had posted a new design contest.  This contest is all about cities.  To get me started (ignore the fact that I had already started in the first posting) I visited Wikipedia to get a list of cities so I could get a look at a whole bunch of names all at once.

Almost immediately, the name Cairo jumped off the page and into my lap.  In mixed case lettering it's not much, but look what happens when you apply all caps:  CAIRO  It's as if RA himself had decreed that a mirror-image ambigram would one day be summoned to proclaim to greatness of that city.

In the three renditions below you'll find a progression of ideas.  In the first image the 'A' and 'R' were altered a bit to find a glyph that could represent either letter.  The letters AIR prompted an image of a pyramid so in the second line I puposefully straightened out the leading edge of the 'A' and trailing edge of the 'R' to give a more definate pyramidal shape to the three middle letters.

In the third rendition I started by thickening up the letters using an outline block font and flattening the tops of the 'A' and 'R' so a more definite pyramid could be placed on top.  As soon as that had been done, the negative spaces of the 'A' and 'R' created a rough outline of an Egyptian hieroglyphic, so I quickly searched for some images that might fill that space.  As providence would have it, the hieroglyph for 'god' fit almost perfectly, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon the hieroglyph for 'town', which is an 'x' inside a circle.

In the next few weeks I'll be refining the image of the 'City of the Gods' a bit more before submitting it to the contest.