The ‘Art and Artist‘ ACAC challenge submissions exhibited a shocking level of creativity and imagination! With the requirements of the challenge making it a very difficult one, we received some absolutely amazing ambigrams.  It really is phenomenal what the human mind can do if you challenge it and push it outside of its comfort zone.

The Results

[NOTE: All designs are copyrighted by the respective artists. We have permission to post them here, but you must get permission from the artist for any other use of their design, or to post them elsewhere.]

1. Bjorn Wichmann - http://www.b-wichmann.de/

Comment 1: Congratulations, Bjorn!  This is so cool on so many levels.  It’s a rotational ambigram.  It’s a 3D ambigram.  AND it’s an ambigram that looks like something that MC Escher himself might have created if he were participating in our challenges here!  This is a wonderful tribute to man that we all hold in high regard, and for your efforts, you receive OUR top honor this month!  Nice work.

Comment 2: Bjorn, absolutely beautiful work! I am certain that Maurits Cornelis himself would be proud of the homage to him as an artist, as well as the accurate reflection of his ‘signature’ as an artist. A worthy tribute and a worthy first place finish.

Note: It has come to the attention of the judges that this ambigram may not have been created specifically for this challenge.  Since this is a friendly competition, we are not going to re-rank the designs, but we did want to make a note that this design appears to have been created prior to this challenge.

2. Johan Skylling

Comment 2: Shrinking this design down to fit into the article space here doesn’t do it justice.  This gem really needs to be seen at full resolution (go ahead and click it to check it out).  As above, this is an awesome tribute to a very creative man, and done in his signature style (if you’re not familiar with his work, click here.)  There was only a very slight compromise with the initial H of the ambigram missing a stem that put a small dent in the armor (so to speak), but the design work is incredible.  Congratulations on another great piece, Johan!

Comment 2: Amazing detail and another wonderful ambigram design! I’m not going to make any armor jokes like the previous comment, but I will say that this ambigram is almost bulletproof! Once again, the detail here is amazing and goes to show that a beautiful ambigram can be as simple as black/white lettering or one as complex as the one you’ve created. Great job!

3.  Ryan McCourt

Comment 1: Since the beginning of these contests, we’ve had submissions of rotational ambigrams.  We’ve had mirror ambigrams.  We’ve had vertical ambigrams.  We’ve had multilingual ambigrams.  We’ve even had hand-drawn ambigrams and 3D ambigrams (see above).  However, we’ve never seen a “performance art” ambigram before!

Ryan McCourt took the “Art and Artists” concept to a whole new level, not only attempting to replicate the artists style in his piece, but the artist’s actual techniques!  Jackson Pollock did a portion of his paintings using a “paint pouring” technique, and Ryan created a Pollock-like painting, using Pollock’s technique, forming an ambigram of Pollock’s name!  We loved this idea, and take our hats off to Ryan’s incredible dedication to accuracy in his submission.  As a side-note, we would have loved to have received a photo of the finished piece as part of the submission!

Comment 2: This is one of the most unique entries we have ever received. As the judge above mentioned, it would be great to see photos of the ambigram ‘performance’ in progress. This entry also shows that the ambigram realm isn’t always limited to pencil, paper, and the computer. Great entry Ryan, and welcome to the Ambigram Challenges!

Note: Our mistake.  This is actually Jackson Pollock, with the ambigram photoshopped into place, and not Ryan McCourt “pouring” his ambigram in paint.  It’s still quite a creative “background” for this piece.  See comments below for details.

4. Daniel Dostal – http://daneel75.wordpress.com/

Comment 1: This is another design that really needs to be seen at full resolution to be appreciated.  Daniel creates a superb ambigram (possibly the best typographical design in this challenge) of artist Albrecht Durer (if you are not familiar with his work, click here).  Unfortunately, it was Durer’s own wood-cut style that makes Daniel’s finished design somewhat difficult to see.

Still, if you take the time to follow the design, you will see what a beautiful ambigram this is, and how very true it is to the artist’s vision.  If a coffee table book is ever published with Albrecht Durer’s artwork, this would make an amazing front cover.  Congratulations on making it into the “Top Five” list (again) Daniel!

Comment 2: Great job on this ambigram Daniel! One of your unique traits is the ability to weave different letterforms together, yet make them seem like they are one letter and were created that way from the start. That is true for this ambigram as well. I also love the consistent feel of the whole piece, from the ambigram itself, to the background texture and the treatment of Durer’s mark. Nice job!

5. Nabil Harb – http://www.flickr.com/photos/wortgewandt13

Comment 1: Nabil created this fascinating piece that says “Jugendstil” (an art period like Art Nouveau) in the style of the period.  Although the extra flourishes make it difficult to read, in the context of this contest, the treatments make perfect sense, and make this a great ambigram that IS what is SAYS.  Nice work, Nabil!

Comment 2: A nice reflection of the Jugendstil period, and aside from some minor legibility issues, it’s a great representation of that art period. Very nice entry Nabil!

We received so many great submissions for this challenge, that we couldn’t just list the top five.  Below are examples of other submissions that were received for this challenge. There is still a great concept behind each of these designs, and the artists who created these pieces deserve to have them shown as much as you deserve to see them.

Michael Irving – Da Vinci

Ryan McCourt – Caro

Diego Colombo – Dante Alighieri

Alessandro Pocaterra – Campbell Soup / Andy Warhol

Daan Juttman – Art Nouveau

Clayton Mabey – Metamorphose (MC. Escher)

Stergioudis Vasileios – Mozart (drawn using musical notes)

Ian Sharp – Cubism

As a side note, we thought that we had received an excellent “Dali” submission, but when it came time to do the judging, there was no such entry in our in-box.  If you submitted a “Dali” ambigram, please re-send it to us.

————————————————–

A big thank you to all the talented artists that submitted their work for this challenge! The next challenge will be posted shortly. Keep an eye out for it…you’ll find that it’s the right season for this type of challenge!

Ambigram generator image sample

Welcome to the ambigram generator comparison page.  Here we will compare all of the paid and free methods of creating an ambigram that exist today, look at their output, and consider the pros and cons of each.

Creating an ambigram generator is a huge task, which explains why not many organizations are jumping at the chance to build one. Doing the job “right” literally requires years and years of work to develop the logic to assemble the letter sequences, create the design and save the output.  The instant output from an ambigram generator makes it look easy, but it is much more difficult than it seems.

In fact, there have only been two attempts at building a computerized tool to create ambigrams: the “Ambimatic” and the “Ambigram Generator” offered from Glyphusion.  Any other software (especially a download) that claims to be able to create ambigrams is a scam, and is most likely a virus, a trojan or some other form of malware.  Do not download any ambigram creator software, or programs that claim to be a download of an “ambigram generator”.  We can assure you that if any new free ambigram creation software becomes available, Ambigram.com will know about it very quickly (and we will update this page if legitimate ambigram creation software becomes available).

To be safe, only trust an ambigram generator that works “on-line”, over the Internet, with no software download required.

Ambigram Creator Comparison

This article will take a detailed look at the two ambigram creation tools that exist today, compare how they work, go into the pros and cons of each, and perform a test ambigram using the words “dream” and “magic” to see how well they perform.

The “Ambimatic”

Also called the “Ambigram-matic”, the Ambimatic was the first ambigram generator, and was released here at ambigram.com in 1996.  It can still be found (and used) here: www.ambigram.com/matic.

How it works.

The Ambimatic relies on inverting one letter of the alphabet to another, so the two input words must be the same length (or be the same word).  There are (26*27)/2 = 351 letter combinations available, so there are no holes or gaps in the letter set.  In other words, every two words of the same length can always be made into an ambigram, and by extension, every word can be made into an ambigram of itself.

The results

Although the Ambimatic will always always produce some result if a word is inverted to itself, the fact that most letters do not naturally invert well to other letters makes the output inconsistent at best.  Picture inverting an “x” to an “o” (totally different shapes), or an “i” to an “m” (totally different lengths) and you get the idea.  You may get lucky and happen to choose a word that is close to a natural ambigram (like “suns”), but most of the time the output from this ambigram generator will be difficult to read.

Test Case

We put the Ambimatic through the “dream / magic” test case, and scaled the output to exactly 200 pixels wide.

Here is the result.

Ambimatic ambigram (dream / magic)

Ambimatic Pros and Cons

Pros

• Will always produce some sort of output from any two words of the same length (including the same word to itself)
• The only free ambigram generator

Cons

• Can not create ambigrams of two words of differing lengths
• In the best case scenario, the words may be readable, but not necessarily pleasing.  In the worst case scenario, the output is completely illegible

The Ambigram Generator from Glyphusion

The ambigram generator offered through Glyphusion was released more than 12 years after the Ambimatic.  This ambigram generator was developed over a span of two years in 2007 and 2008 (and revised in 2009 and 2010) by programmer Mark Hunter and licensed to Glyphusion, and uses artwork licensed from ambigram artist Mark Palmer.

How it Works

The ambigram generator offered through Glyphusion uses software logic to create ambigrams of words that differ in length, and creates ambigrams as vector designs, which allows them to scale perfectly and position much more cleanly than the Ambimatic.  Interestingly, it will not always be able to create an ambigram of two words, even if they have the same length.  Even if two words have the same length and an ambigram is produced, they will not necessarily line up letter-by-letter (as our test case shows)

The Results

Since the ambigram generator offered through Glyphusion is very sophisticated about ambigram creation, it will not be able to produce an ambigram of any two arbitrary words (even if they have the same length).  However, its success rate is very high, and the algorithms that it uses ensures that the ambigrams that it does create are usually vastly superior to the results obtained from the Ambimatic.

Test Case

We put the ambigram generator offered through Glyphusion through the “dream / magic” test case, and scaled the output to exactly 200 pixels wide.

Here is the result.

Ambigram from Glyphusion (dream / magic)

As you can see, letters are combined where the ambigram generator offered through Glyphusion feels necessary to produce the most aesthetically pleasing output, which is far more complicated than a simple letter inversion tool.

Glyphusion Pros and Cons

Pros

• Can create ambigrams of differing lengths (like “better” and “man”)
• The results are aesthetically pleasing, and in many cases so legible that you may not know that the design is an ambigram at first.

Cons

• May not produce a design if the generator does not feel that the output would be up to its quality standards
• Not a free ambigram generator (but well worth the money for a polished design that would take a day to do by hand)

Many people come to this page looking for a high-quality and free ambigram generator.  Unfortunately, there is no such thing due to the amount of work involved to create high-quality ambigram generator software.

You can learn more about these two tools at their respective web sites:

• Ambimatic – www.ambigram.com/matic
• Glyphusion – www.glyphusion.com

Want to share your own experiences with either (or both) of these tools?  Feel free to comment below.