Ambigrams and the creative process

by | Tuesday, July 15, 2008

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is “devoted to the art and process behind ambigrams. It’s not meant just to showcase ambigram work, but rather explore each artist’s individual process & approach to ambigrams.” What a great idea.

You can access the blog by going to http://ambigramblog.blogspot.com/. Nikita has managed to get interviews with some of the top ambigrammists (John Langdon and Scott Kim are featured) and has lots of examples for people to see. What is wonderful is the emphasis on the creative process, rather than the final product. A well created ambigram is a coherent and elegant whole and can appear almost magical. Breaking down the process (the techniques, the tricks, the flashes of insight and the mechanics) can offer insight into broader issues of creativity and human ability. Douglas Hofstadter has called the process of creating ambigrams as being a “microdomain” for the study of creativity and it seems to me that Nikita’s blog offers a series of fascinating case-studies of this.

Many years ago I actually conducted a study (with Beena Choksi) on the creative process of developing ambigrams. We got novices into the lab and asked them to play with creating ambigrams of specific words we gave them. What was interesting was that people’s relative success (or enjoyment) with the task depended greatly on how they defined creativity. Those who defined creativity as a kind of “play with ideas and images” had more success and fun with the task than those who defined creativity as being a kind of personal expression. We never did publish the study but it was presented at a couple of conferences. I will try and dig that out to share with a wider audience.

Topics related to this post: Ambigrams | Art | Creativity | Design | Fun | Psychology | Representation | Research | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

My Good-Evil oscillation ambigram design is easily one of my most popular designs - having made it to multiple publications, websites, covers of magazines, on the TV Show Brain Games... and now it has made its way into a medical research journal Frontiers of...

A-EYE: When AI can see

A-EYE: When AI can see

AI can now see! And talk to you about what it sees! ChatGPT released its latest upgrade - the ability to not just create images but also to interpret them. I had been waiting for a while now to get access to these new vision features - and just this morning it popped...

You have been terminated: A case for humane design

You have been terminated: A case for humane design

Good design cares about details. Good design is humane. Bad design is neither. Designers must bring this attention to detail and humanity to every aspect of their work. And this applies even the invisible parts. This, caring for the "invisible" details, is captured in...

By the Numbers

I just discovered a blog by Charles Blow, visual Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes. Titled By the Numbers it is a site for "discussion about all things statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions." Pretty cool. Check it out.

Day 2, after lunch, Kozma

I just starred in a movie! Turns out that they are making a documentary about the conference and were interviewing various participants. So I ended up out holding a microphone in front of a conference banner (that would be the background), speaking into a video...

iPhones, higher ed & faculty resistance

Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...

The mysterious pentagon… explained?

Around 2 weeks ago I posted a note about a "pentagon" I saw in some boiling lentils in my kitchen. There have been some interesting responses to this... but before I get to that, here is the original image, if you missed the original posting: Interestingly enough, a...

Day 3: Meetings & Workshop

Day 2 ended with my meeting KHari (aka Chairman) and Rags (aka Chore) - two BITS batchmates, whom I hadn't met in almost 18 / 20 years. It was great catching up with them - but what that meant was that by the time I got back to my room I was totally exhausted and...

The (type)face of Obama

As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.

1 Comment

  1. yasemin

    yasemin ambigram pls

    Reply

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