Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Ambigram for Pune, India

Earlier in the year Ambigram Magazine held a contest to come up with ambigrams for city names. I had done a number of quick pencil sketches for a variety of city names, some of which were presented in an earlier blog, including a sketch for the city of Pune, India.  A closeup of that pencil sketch is shown to the right.

To get that sketch to something more suitable for a logo, letterhead, or something that might be suitable for a T-shirt or travel poster I scanned the sketch into The Gimp to clean it up a bit then used Inkscape to make scalable vector image.  The steps that were used are outlined here:


  1. After opening the scanned image in The Gimp, the threshold tool was used to get a black and white image.
  2. A copy of the letters was rotated 180° and overlaid on top of the original black and white image.
  3. The resulting 'holes' in the letter strokes were filled in.

  4. The black and white image with the filled in strokes was imported into Inkscape and the trace-bitmap tool was used to convert the PNG image to a set of vector objects.  Because the 'N' and 'E' are rotated copies of the 'P' and 'U', the 'N' and 'E' were deleted and all the vector tweaking was performed only on the 'P' and 'U'.  Once the tweaking was completed to my satisfaction a copy of the 'P' and 'U' was rotated 180° and added to the vector image.  This ensures that the two halves really are rotationally symetrical about the center of the image.  The result is shown below:





When I look at this result I can still see the basic outline of an elephant lurking in the 'U' and 'N'; I see the curved part of the 'U' as an upraised trunk and the curved part of the 'N' as back end of the elephant.  This idea will be explored in more depth later.



Friday, July 16, 2010

Emily and Molly

This is the initial paper sketch for a symbiotogram of the names Emily and Molly. The design was inspired by my second submission to the Ambigram Magazine Couples Ring Design Challenge.

This design is intended to fit within a diamond shape but could easily be adapted to fit in an oval as well.  It was very tricky trying to get an 'O' to look like an 'I' when turned upside down!

Stay tuned to this page for further updates to this design.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Couples Ring Design Challenge

The ambigram to the right has been submitted to the current Ambigram Magazine design contest Couples Ambigram Ring Challenge.  This is a 180° rotational figure-ground ambigram with the names of my wife and me.  In the orientation shown here, the black figures spell 'SUSAN'.  When rotated 180° the white spaces between the black figures spell 'ERIK'.

This design was a bit tricky since the contest rules required the design to display a different name in each orientation (termed "symbiotogram') and 'Susan' and 'Erik' have a different number of characters.  While there are plenty of symbiotograms made from words with different lengths, the classic "Life / Death" design comes to mind, I prefer designs that don't rely heavily on modified Old-English or Old-German fonts.  I find that many designs that rely heavily on these fonts are difficult to read.

For this design the serifs on the 'E' and 'I' were mostly unavoidable; the serifs on the 'E' could be minimized or eliminated by extending the first upright of the 'N' to line up with the vertical extents of all the other figures.  Because we tend to focus mostly on the top half of letters, the extra black blobs between the first 'S' and 'U' and between the second 'S' and 'A' in 'Susan' and the extra white blobs between 'E' and 'R' and between 'I' and 'K' in 'Erik' seemingly disappear.