I love the serendipty of the web. I was looking at a paper on the
economic impact of P2P file sharing on CDs at
First Monday, so I looked at the table of contents while I was there. Another paper entitled
On becoming a Web site by
Punya Mishra intrigued me, so I skimmed it and then followed the link to the
author's home page. This is where I discovered the
Ambigram!
Ambigram n., - a word or words that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, such as both right side up and upside down. (from Latin: ambi=both + gram=letter).
Here is the beautiful example of an animated ambigram on Punya's home page that caught my eye:
A good example of a natural ambigram is MOW, which spells mow either way you flip in (i.e., rotate by 180 degrees). What's really cool about ambigrams is that with some creative calligraphy, any word or phrase can be rendered as an ambigram!
In fact, there is an automatic ambigram generator called Ambigram.Matic. Here is my first name, Nick, rendered as an ambigram:
Here are my first and last names, Nick Gall, rendered as an ambigram:
Here are three great resources for more fun with ambigrams (with much more elegant examples than my automatically generated ones): Ambigram.com, Inversions, Visual Wordplay Gallery.
BTW, ambigrams are also known as inversions, designatures, and symmetricks. Funny how the same mulitiplicity of synonyms affects ambigrams as affects antagonyms.
6:07:13 AM 
