Ambigram.com Andrey, tell us a bit about yourself. How did you become interested in graphic design and typography?

Andrey Shch I am a human, a male as such. That I know for sure. Any other characteristics of myself and what I do bore me to death. They just don’t seem colorful enough to me for describing something as grand and mysterious as art.

I would say that I have been granted a permission to live in art’s minor region called Graphic Design, or rather in a small corner of it called Typography. Someone or something from that world got interested in me and invited me in which I am sincerely grateful for, and doing what I do simply seems like most appropriate way of returning the favor.

Ambigram.com Your typography work has an amazingly precise feel to it, especially the hand-drawn pieces. How long did it take you to master such a lettering technique?

Andrey Shch I mastered this technique one windy autumn day during my apprenticeship among Chinese monks of Hunan province. Didn’t really take that long… The precision embowered me while chasing mosquitoes with chopsticks. 20 hours of such exercise each day and you will be mastering it just as well. 30 or 45 years is more than enough. You will probably need some luck though.

Ambigram.com Where does your inspiration come from? Do you have a favorite designer, typographer, artist, or art period that consistently influences you and your work?

Andrey Shch The main source of inspiration is those bottomless eyes of beautiful, wise women which hide crystal clear hearts deep within. No designer, typographer or calligrapher in the world is able to replicate or describe with words the things they can do to you with those eyes. In my opinion, there is no inspiration without being slightly in love in some beautiful women beyond one’s reach, and each creative period of mine is simply a time of being in love.

Ambigram.com Your work aesthetic has a very wide range, from highly decorative to elegant and reserved. How do you know where to draw the line (no pun intended)?

Andrey Shch There is no absolute certainty in my works. Not in a single line. I go along with my intuition and just let my hand feel where to do draw the line and where to curve it, what to do or not to do. It’s like being in love – you never know what comes next, you just trust the feeling to lead you in the right direction. You just follow it.

Ambigram.com Do you prefer to incorporate hand-rendered graphics into every project, or do you only do so at the client’s request?

Andrey Shch I do try to enchant each work with that special element, whether it is hand-rendered graphics or some other yet unknown sort of graphics which has no name, but may only be expressed by the line’s bend. Even though it is not always visible, it does live in every piece.

Ambigram.com :When did you first hear about ambigrams? Do you remember the first ambgiram you’ve ever seen?

Andrey Shch I toyed with ambigrams since childhood. Me and my school love exchanged love poems written on small pieces of squared paper during math classes. If we got caught, the teacher could only see simple numbers and formulas which only two of us could turn around just right. We did it for a long time – hiding our feelings behind fractions and equations.

Therefore, yes. I do remember my first ambigram, how could I forget? It was my first love. You just don’t forget such things.

Ambigram.com Here we have several ambigrams you’ve designed (here I will use the two examples you gave me.) Were these personal projects or requested piece? Do you have any other ambigrams you can share with us?

Andrey Shch I see each piece as a personal project and I don’t undertake projects if I can’t see myself contributing with something of my own, if I can’t make them personal. Just like a composer, I play my own music and if the spectators pay for the show… Well, that’s a nice bonus. And yes, I do have other ambigrams you can take a look at.

Ambigram.com Are there any ambigram artists that you admire?

Andrey Shch This is an interesting question and I would like to fluctuate a bit from the obvious answers if you don’t mind. This is amazing, but I do get a lot of personal letters, especially from ladies, and I do prefer to see them as artists in this particular context. Solving their complex ambigrams is a constant source of inspiration. Simple letters and handwriting can hide so much more complex and even ambiguous things! It never stops to amaze me. Inspiring indeed…

Ambigram.com Let’s go back to your hand-lettering for a minute. Can you provide some suggestions to designers & artists that want to experiment with hand-lettered graphics and typography? What tools would you recommend? Can you recommend and specific techniques and approaches?

Andrey Shch I really couldn’t be sure if what I do is calligraphy. It’s a very unprompted, natural thing for me.

Don’t concern yourself with techniques so much! You will never be able to say you’ve mastered something as elusive as some unspecified technique. You will always be running after some bus which you don’t need in a first place just to find out later that you have a free lifetime ticket for a transportation mode of your choice.

Experiment with your brain instead. It is always near at hand and it never runs out of ink or battery. Your own personal style will shape itself when you realize you’re doing what you love and you’re doing it the way you want to. Try not to listen to advices too much. Really. And take mine with a lot of skepticism and irony as well. For example, this one – Your head is guiding your hand and your hand is guiding the pencil. Learn to control your thoughts and you will be able to do wonders. And while you are drawing, don’t think about anything else but drawing. You don’t need any other thoughts while you do that. As soon as you start thinking whether or not something you do will be modern, rated, saleable, famous or scandalous – just stop and walk away, away from your piece, from your desk as far as you can. Stay away until you stop thinking and feel peaceful again. Now you can continue.

Ambigram.com Can you name a favorite project of yours? Why is it your favorite?

Andrey Shch Vogue. A project where the client had full respect and understanding for my artistic perspective and gave me liberty of action for realization of the original idea.

Ambigram.com What is your favorite typeface?

Andrey Shch Those which are time-tested just like Cheops Pyramid. Non-commercial ones, created thoughtfully, thoroughly, to a tee.

Early Chinese writing from The Shang Dynasty ages, found in Jiahu. They are dated 1765-1027 BCA – supposedly the Chinese writing’s time of birth. They are about 8600 years old. And very beautiful.

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Dear Andrey, thank you so much for interviewing with Ambigram.com and providing examples of your beautiful work! For more examples of Andrey’s work, please visit http://www.sgr.kiev.ua/.

1. Miracle Whip? While the M/W is an obvious ambigram, I never thought I would see this on a container of mayonnaise from Kraft! My girlfriend picked this out of a crowded store shelf in a blink of an eye, and I cannot believe I didn’t see it first!

2. The Sun microsystems logo has been around for 28 years before it was acquired by Oracle in 2010. While the company itself doesn’t technically exist anymore, the ambigram logo survives!

3. Say what you while about Hyundai quality, but at least part of their logo is an ambigram!

4. Xpedx is a simple yet effective ambigram, and in my mind embodies what a corporate ambigram should be: readable, legible, and aesthetically suited for the business.

If any of our readers see ambigrams in the real world, take a photo and send me an email, telling me where you saw the ambigram & what you think of it. We might just feature it in the next “Real World Ambigrams.”

Ambigram.com: Tiffany, thank you for speaking with us. I will ask you the same question that I ask everyone, yet the answer never gets old, because each time the answer is slightly different:

How did you become interested in ambigrams?

Tiffany: Like most people, I was first introduced to ambigrams through John Langdon‘s work, but it was not from “Angels & Demons”. An online friend of mine was asked to be be in a book about words that are used as tattoos and posted a picture of the featured tattoo, Langdon’s mirror-image design of the word “Balance” (which she had permission to use). I immediately rushed over to Langdon’s site and was fascinated by the rotational designs. I’ve always been interested in calligraphy, word puzzles, optical illusions, and secret codes, so I had to try it out myself.

Ambigram.com: What was the very first ambigram you created? We’d love to see an example of it.

Tiffany: The first thing I tried was my last name, “Harvey”. Luckily, it was a very easy word to use! I drew it out on paper and then tried to draw it on the computer with my mouse, which is never pretty, but this was the basic design.

Once I started, I couldn’t stop!

Ambigram.com: You have a strong background in arts & crafts. How has that influenced your ambigram design?

Tiffany: I’ve always noticed a lot of cross over between different arts. When you are working on ceramics, you might use painting or carving techniques. I’ve used origami in resin pendants, stitched together paper on my sewing machine to create greeting cards, it all overlaps. In some ways, even the patchwork and the the embellishments I add to the ambigrams are similar. I was always trying to arrange the different fabrics in a way that looked random, but balanced, the same way I might layout stars and curls and dots around the letters of an ambigram. Developing an eye for details will carry through to any kind of artistic work.

Ambigram.com: Now, I have to ask this question. Aesthetically speaking, your ambigrams are spot on almost every single time. How do you create those perfectly matching curves, flourishes, and the rest of the intricate details that are such an integral part of your ambigram style?

Tiffany: I think repeating the same motif throughout the design can really help. If you look at fonts, you will see the same lines and curves appearing again and again throughout the letters. That is what creates the unifying style of the font. You can add a curl, or stick thin lines in among thick ones, but try to add them to the design more than once so that they become part of the overall style.

Ambigram.com: To follow up the previous question, how much of a factor does computer software play in your design? Do you create the complete ambigram using just paper/pencil  & then finalize it on the computer, or do you create very rough sketches and then develop the ambigram on the computer?

Tiffany: In the beginning, I did draw out the ambigrams on paper and scan them in to trace on the computer. I didn’t have a very good program to do this with, I was basically drawing with my mouse again, but I worked with large images so I could smooth things out easier.

Soon after that I was introduced to Inkscape, which is basically a free version of Illustrator, so that I could create vector images. Last year I got a Wacom graphics tablet, and have since then retired the scanner. I do still create a very rough sketch when a customer first contacts me, just to make sure ambigram is possible. I either create a more finished sketch on the computer, which is then re-worked in Inkscape, or use my rough sketch as a guide and lay out the ambigram from the font pieces of previous designs.

Here you can see it a little more step-by-step.

Ambigram.com: Are there any types of ambigrams you haven’t tried before that you’d like to design in the future? Have you ever designed any ambigrams in a different language?

Tiffany: I’m actually learning Japanese right now, and I’d love to create some bilingual ambigrams in Japanese and English.  These Chinese-English ambigrams are an inspiration.   I have created a few foreign ambigrams, though most of them use the Latin alphabet, so they are not very different from normal ambigrams in English, or some of the unusual names I get!

The most difficult foreign design I’ve done was a Russian ambigram in the Cyrillic alphabet, because I have no real concept of what makes the letters readable, or the different styles they can take on. I based my sketches on a cursive version of the alphabet I found online and sent the customer a few variations so she could pick what was most readable.

Ambigram.com: Are there any artists in the ambigram community that inspire you? Is there anyone whose work you follow really closely?

Tiffany: Of course, John Langdon was a big inspiration, and I remember looking at a lot of other work when I was first starting out. Now I think I tend to avoid others’ ambigrams, because I worry about being unintentionally inspired by other designs.

Ambigram.com: What is your own personal process for developing an ambigram, from start to finish? Where do you find your inspiration?

Tiffany: You can see a a lot of my step-by-step process in the above question about software. As far as inspiration, I think most of it comes from my customers. Sometimes the ambigrams are simply a matter of putting two names together with a font I’ve used many times before.

Other times the customers comes to me with layouts and embellishments I’ve never created before, a list of 10 fonts that I would not normally consider for an ambigram, or even ask for non-ambigram word art. The further I am drug out of my comfort zone, the more I start to worry, but the designs you struggle with are usually the ones you are most proud of in the end.

Ambigram.com: What advice would you give someone who is just starting to design their first ambigram?

Tiffany: Get a calligraphy book and practice writing a few of the alphabets. You don’t need to get really good at it (I certainly never was!), but seeing how the strokes repeat, and how the same letter can be completely different from one alphabet to the next, can really help you put together a readable design. Practice is also a big part of it.  The more ambigrams you draw, the more successful letter combinations you will discover and file away in your mind for future use.

Ask a friend if they can read your design, and what letters need more work. You already know what the word is supposed to be, so you need outside opinions. Also, small tweaks can really affect the readability of an ambigram, so don’t be afraid to play around with a hard-to-read letter.

Ambigram.com: One last question and then we’ll let you get back to work. If you had to pick one major corporation out there and redesign their logo as an ambigram, who would it be?

Tiffany: There have been several times when I have seen a logo and thought, “that would be pretty easy to turn into an ambigram”, and even considered making one up for fun and sending it to the company. Of course, now that you ask, I can’t remember any of them!

I think the most fun designs to create would be for a company that could really use the rotational aspect of the ambigram in their product, like on a watch or Ferris wheel, or across a tablecloth at a restaurant where customers could read the design from both sides.

Ambigram.com: Tiffany, thank you for the interview. We look forward to seeing more work from you!

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You can find more examples of Tiffany’s work at her web site at: http://wordillusion.com/

I contacted the owner of the blog, and they pointed me in the direction the artist Papper & Penna. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about the creation process for the Ektopia logo.  Read on!

1. What type of a blog is Ektopia, and why did you think an ambigram logo was the perfect solution?

Used with permission from Ektopia and Papper & Penna

Ektopia blog is about creative art. The logo wasn’t a commission design. Me and Jay (Ektopia) are friends on “Flickr” and I follow his photostream. In his gallery I saw an attempt of his doing an “reflection” ambigram (see below).  He explained how he needed a new logo for his blog “Ektopia” and that he really wanted it to be an ambigram but had some struggles and was reaching out for ideas.

As soon as i laid my eyes on his drawing I got inspired and thought of how I could improve his design and make the letters work better with each other.  I’ve been drawing letters my whole life but I became really passionate when I discovered graffiti. As a graffiti writer I always aimed for symmetry in my letters. The thing about graffiti is that it’s often meant to be wild and hard to read. But an ambigram is no good in my opinion if it is not clearly legible. I hate ambigrams that look forced into symmetry.

After some doodling pen on paper I soon discovered that the letter combination “ektopia” would work better as a rotational ambigram and not reflectional. Its a fun challenge sketching up letters one by one that should work as other letters up side down. I constantly rotated my paper and it must have been a funny sight if you didn’t know what I was up to.

2. What and/or who was your inspiration for the ambigram mark?

Jay’s sketch.

Used with permission from Ektopia and Papper & Penna

3. The Ektopia ambigram has a very distinct aesthetic to it: the blackletter/gothic look is a fairly common trend in ambigram design. Was that the initial look you were going for, or did you attempt other styles as well?

I think the main reason that the “gothic” look is common among ambigram designs is that the letters often are symmetrical as they are. Gothic and blackletters have very straight-vertical lines which is appreciated when you draw ambigrams. They are also decorative and you can hide or reveal letter-parts among “ornaments”. I don´t know if that answered your question but yeah I wanted the logo to be artsy/aesthetic, but a script font could have worked as well. The important thing is how you alter it.

4. Do you think the mark accurately represents Ektopia and its purpose?

Yeah, Ektopia’s blog is about more than just art and my logo-design is more than just a logo.

5. What was the most challenging aspect of the design & development process of the ambigram mark?

An ambigram is always challenging if the word is not an palindrome obviously. Haha. But if you want me to pin point out a specific detail I guess it was making the “kt” look like a “p” upside down.

Used with permission from Ektopia and Papper & Penna

6. Are there any ambigram artists that you personally admire?

I honestly don’t know any names but a personal favorite is the logo for “Blacksmith management”. It looks so obvious and natural, not forced into an ambigram.  (Take a look at the Blacksmith ambigram here.)

7. What is your background? Are you a designer, fine artist, or a hybrid of the two? Or, is there anything else in the mix that inspires your design and art?

I am a freelance logo designer. Together with a friend I have “Papper och Penna”. I find inspiration in everything from my 3 year old sons drawings to food labels and old signs.

Much thanks to both Papper & Penna and the Ektopia blog for providing the material for this article.

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Here is the link to the Ektopia blog
Ektopia Blog http://www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia/

Here is the Flickr photo-stream for Papper & Penna. Take a look at some of his wonderful typographic work!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/papperochpenna

The only way to understand the true essence of an ambigram is to read Ambigram.com, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop, ignoring any other commitments and responsibilities in your life. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Since June of 2008, Nikita Prokhorov has been the owner and contributor to Ambiblog, one of the most popular ambigram related blogs on the Internet.

His interest in ambigrams was first peaked by seeing the ambigram designs in Dan Brown’s thriller Angels & Demons, much like most of the ambigram lovers out there.  But he didn’t want to just be an ambigram designer; he wanted to explore the design process behind ambigrams and how different & unique it is for each artist.  Thus, his Ambigram blog, or “Ambiblog” was born.  It was created to not just showcase ambigram design, but rather to explore the process and get insight from various ambigram artists across the world.  Ambiblog will be merging with Ambigram.com and Nikita will be joining the Ambigram.com team effective Wednesday, April 29th, 2009.

In addition to his interest in the design process of other ambigram artists, Nikita is an excellent ambigram artist himself.  You can see some of his design methodology at work in this set of Christmas cards he created that says “Merry Christmas” whether it is read upright or upside-down.  Note his use of graph paper to ensure that the design is perfectly symmetric.

Nikita's "Merry Christmas" ambigram

Outside of ambigrams, Nikita is a freelancing graphic designer & a professor at Central Connecticut State University.  As a freelance graphic design, he has created work that was published by Logolounge and has written for HOW Magazine, one of the design industry’s most premier magazines.  His writing has also been published by The International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda).

Nikita will be publishing a new article every Wednesday, and you can read his article series by clicking on his name under “Our Contributors” at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar on every page.  Please welcome Nikita on board, and come back every week to read what’s new on “Nikita Wednesday”, here at Ambigram.com.