Miscellaneous City Names

Yet another post in support of Ambigram Magazine's 'Where in the World' city name ambigram contest...  ...you'd think they were sponsoring this blog space.

In the two images below you'll find a number of different city names with a little bit of exploration work done on a few.

I'm sure I've seen the mirror-image version of 'Baghdad' before, so I doubt I can take credit for it. 

'Alexandria' feels like it wants to be a mirror-image ambigram but that 'N' in the middle might be a challenge.

To me 'Rome' feels like it wants to be rendered as a vertical mirror-image, but with the top half of the letters 'completed' and the bottom half reflecting the top.  You'll see that the tops of the letters are missing so that the closed loop at the top of the 'R' isn't completely closed allowing the bottom to also remain open.  This might work out better in the native Italian spelling 'ROMA'.

The 'Paris' idea has some merit and deserves to be pursued further.  I'm not sure that the 'A' and 'I' can both be convincingly rendered as the Eiffel tower without causing confusion over which is the 'A' and which is the 'I', but as with most ambigrams, our minds create what we expect to see so it would probably work.

'Cape Town' was explored only briefly.

'Baranagar' might not fit the Ambigram Magazine contest criteria if the judges are very strict (they state that the city name must be considered a major city), but all those 'A's are begging to be mirrored.

'Pune' was so obvious it almost hurt when it smacked me in the face.

'Bally' should be easy enough to complete as a rotational ambigram.

'Pasay' almost writes itself as a rotational ambigram, but again it might not meet the contest criteria if the judges are strict.

I only played with 'Manila' briefly to see what I could do with the starting 'M' and ending 'A'.  It should be fairly easy to manipulate the 'L' and interior 'A' to be legible in more than one position.

'Beijing' surprised me a bit.  I wasn't sure what to do with the 'E'-'N' combination and the current representation looks rather Art Nouveau.  I'm also not completely thrilled with the way the 'J' jumps out in the middle; it looks too much like a violin f-hole or an integral sign.  Perhaps if I made each of the 'J's the same height as the other interior letters it would be less obtrusive.  The glyphs should also be rendered to look a bit more like Chinese characters for emphasis.

Last, but not least, the second image shows something workable for 'London'.  I'm not too terribly surprised that it has ended up looking a lot like John Langdon's anagram of his own name.