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Allan Haley comments: Ambigrams are delightful graphic logotypes that read the same if they are reversed or flipped upside-down. The author Dan Brown made ambigrams famous in his book Angels & Demons, and John Langdon is the undisputed master of their creation. In the article that follows, Langdon tells us how he came to draw these typographic doppelgängers and, better yet, advises on how to create one for yourself.

I began creating ambigrams in the early 1970s. Wordplay, my book of ambigrams and the philosophical essays I wrote to accompany them, was published in 1992. Dan Brown’s father bought a copy of Wordplay and showed it to Dan. Eight years later, Angels & Demons was published, featuring seven ambigrams Dan had commissioned me to do. It would be a few more years, however, until The DaVinci Code brought the world’s attention to Dan’s previous books. After twenty-some years, ambigrams became, relatively speaking, an overnight sensation.

Ambigrams emerged from my strong interests in and inclinations toward language and design. My first job in the graphic arts industry was in the photolettering department of a type shop, and my first intense interest in graphic design was in logo design. I was turned on by Herb Lubalin’s typographic gymnastics. But other factors had significant influence on my work as well. I was almost obsessed with the yin/yang symbol and the universal principles it symbolized. M.C. Escher’s graphic illusions addressed some of the same concepts. I also loved psychedelic poster lettering, which broke the rules of conventional typography and tested the limits of readability.

In my personal explorations, I began trying to force words into the figure/ground relationships that Escher had coerced his birds and fish into. That didn’t work out very well. But in the process, I discovered what later became known as ambigrams. I had seen a few such typographic marvels before: Raymond Loewy’s New Man logo and Dick Hess’ Vista were beautiful examples, but they were almost “naturals”—requiring minimal alteration of standard letterforms. Lubalin had conceived of an invertible 72 that necessitated more manipulation and required Tom Carnase’s considerable drawing skills to make it work. Here were logos that could be read from alternate viewpoints—like Escher’s impossible architecture—and called for the distortion of conventional letters without destroying their function or their attractiveness in the process. I was hooked.

SYMMETRY
Symmetry surrounds us in our daily lives to a degree that few of us are aware of. Most evident are approximate bilateral symmetries—the ubiquitous left/right balance that characterizes trees, animals, buildings, cars, mountains and so on. These symmetries are so common we almost never think of them consciously. Equally important, but far less immediately evident, are the rotational symmetries that govern the way things work. Polarized opposites of day and night, active and passive, inhale and exhale, heat and cold, etc., represent dynamic systems that revolve around and within us in patterns that, on a day-to-day basis, we barely notice.

The symmetries of ambigrams are similar to symmetries in the environment. Most ambigrams are created with unvarying, rotational symmetry, and that symmetry is less immediately apparent than with bilaterally symmetrical ambigrams. As language-reading human beings, we don’t expect words to be symmetrical; but nonetheless, the more subtle symmetry of a rotational ambigram lends the design a subtle beauty that a viewer may respond to unconsciously.

WHAT MAKES AN AMBIGRAM WORK?
It’s important for ambigram designers to understand it’s almost impossible to predetermine the look of an ambigram. The style is almost 100 percent determined by the manipulations required to make it readable and aesthetically harmonious. Ambigrams are all about breaking rules, but a very high regard for the rules that govern typography will result in either a successful ambigram or just one more unsuccessful experiment to discard. I discard a lot.

THE PROCESS
I begin by writing the ambigram candidate upside down. Let’s take the word ENERGY as an example (fig. 1). I then try to imagine the Y as an E. Do they share any shapes or strokes? At first glance, no, they don’t. On the other hand, I can easily imagine an inverted cap G as a lowercase n. The ambigram designer must be open-minded about breaking any typographic convention, beginning with the structures. The willingness to mix cap and lowercase forms is also a requirement.

I’ve encountered the E/R combination dozens of times before, so I know that the second E can easily become an R. When this pair is separated by other letters, the vertical stem of the R usually has to be sacrificed. When they’re together in the middle of a word, we get to keep that stroke, as it will play the same role in both directions (fig. 2).

It is vital to understand the essences of the letters of the alphabet. How much of a letter can be eliminated before the letter loses its identity? The vertical stem is a normal part of about half of the letters in the alphabet, so it is clearly not a distinguishing feature. Most of those letters are fully recognizable without the stem, but if we can keep it—as we can in this case—it simply makes the word a bit more familiar looking.

It appears that traditional weight placement will not cause any difficulties in the word ENERGY. I try a couple of versions with subtle weight variations, but it’s soon evident that a very thin stroke at the top of the second E helps the R to retain its recognizability. Yes, it’s an extra stroke, vital in defining the top of the second E, but being very light, it’s fairly innocuous at the bottom of the R.

One principle of the way we read words is of paramount importance in the design of an ambigram: Because we read from the top of the page down, the tops of letters are the most important in identifying letters. That means the bottom of a letter can be manipulated much more freely than the top, and that’s greatly beneficial, because the bottoms of the letters facing one way are the tops of the letters facing the other way—one more reason that the extra stroke at the base of the R will not pose a problem.

LESS COOPERATIVE LETTERS
While other solutions are falling into place nicely, the E/Y is the problem. The best way to deal with a seemingly intractable problem in creating an ambigram is to brutally force it to do what you want (as in figs. 2 and 3) with no regard for what happens … for the time being. By forcing a shape where an E has some Y characteristics and vice versa, I can then see the beginnings of a more satisfactory solution. The two Es will not match, but as one of them is the initial letter, I can take some liberties supported by the long history of cap and lowercase differences. The bottom of that initial E will have to be lopped off—as gently and tastefully as possible, of course, but I’m hoping I can get away with that—trusting that the reader will have grasped the E-ness from the top of the letter and moved on to more familiar forms before realizing that the bottom is, in fact, missing (fig. 3).

My sketches (figs. 1 through 4) convince me that the initial E will read, but I still want to make that radical surgery as subtle as I can. The weight experiments (figs. 5a, 5b and 5c) reveal that not only will a fairly extreme weight variation serve the beauty of the word very well, but that the extension of a serif on the inside of the upper left arm of the Y and a bit of a flourish at the end of the right arm will provide a slight visual closing of the unnatural gap at the bottom of the E. The contrasting heavy strokes will end rather abruptly, creating the quick impression of the open space we expect at the top of the Y.

THE MACRO VIEW
Much of ambigram design depends on the fact that we read not letter by letter, but in whole words and clusters of words. We recognize a word as a whole from having seen it hundreds of times before. It is much, much easier to create a successful ambigram of a familiar word or name than an uncommon one.

The process of designing an ambigram follows a formula for creativity. It begins with a right-brained, no-holds-barred, openminded, nonjudgmental, playful exploration of any and all possibilities. It gradually moves into a more left-brained, controlling orientation, as judgment is required to find and identify problems. High levels of aesthetic judgment are applied in the very sensuous and sensitive stage of the final pencil drawing (fig. 6) . The process reaches its conclusion in the logical brain of a Macintosh computer and the mathematical wizardry of Bezier curves (figs. 7a-b).