Ambigrams Revealed

Okay, so everyone’s seen my name logo ambigram, but I’ve got a few others I’m working on that I thought I’d roll out for you as promised. (I also have a couple I’ve done for my daughters, but for privacy reasons, those shall remain confidential.)

First is one I did for an upcoming art show being put on by my company’s Creative Services department. This one I just rolled out pretty quickly — I planned to go back and tweak it some more, but at this point I don’t think I’ll have time. The plan had been to create a general-purpose “Creative Services” ambigram (so that it would have a life beyond just this one show), but for the life of me I couldn’t get the two words to reflect each other. But once I added “Art Show” to it, and realized that “Services” could effectively reflect itself, I had something I could work with. (The toughest part was figuring out how to hide the capital S in the word “Creative.”) It’s far from my favorite — it still feels a little cobbled together — but it serves its purpose; the boss wants to give framed versions out to the show’s organizers (with my blessing, of course).

The second is one I did after a series of conversations I had on the ChipTalk website (the one where I won that chip design contest) about card back designs. Generally speaking, to deter cheating, you want to make sure that the design of a card back looks identical no matter which way it’s turned (the theory being that an unscrupulous player could turn one card around and pick it out from the others). Casino decks often have the name of the casino at both ends for this very reason. In the discussion, some designs had text in the middle, a definite no-no. I proposed that you could have text (or a logo, or what have you) in the middle, so long as the item was ambigrammatic. Since some of the discussion centered around a customized ChipTalk deck, I slapped together a ChipTalk ambigram to demonstrate (complete with rotation shown). So far, it hasn’t generated a lot of response, but I decided to finish it up anyway. (Incidentally, if anyone has an interest in poker chip collecting and would like to join the Chiptalk community — and maybe make a few comments on the logo to get the ball rolling — do please let me know. I’d appreciate the chance to refer you.)

And the last one is visible right there at the top of this page — the slightly redesigned logo for Prometheus Unleashed. It’s certainly derived from the prior iteration, but I really worked to improve the readability (something I’ve been working on for months). Not perfect yet (and I may still do some tweaking), but I think it’s definitely more legible.

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