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.