After I had posted my “Paris, City of Love” design on FB, my friend Pilar Quezzaire posted on my wall the following question:

What about Beirut and Nairobi, Punya? Can you make one for them as well?

In another posting she linked to the website http://www.warsintheworld.com/  and a quick glance through it shows just how much conflict there is in the world today – and how much of it we ignore (until something happens that hits closer to home).

I felt the sting of Pilar’s criticism and got to work. My first response was to create ambigrams for each of these cities names (Nairobi and Beirut – two sites that recently were hit with terrible, violent events) but that seemed inadequate, compared at least to the “Paris, City of Love” design.

So hence the design above.

Of course, one never stops at one solutions (variations on a theme being the crux of creativity) …

… so here are two more. The first builds on  John Donne’s Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, more commonly known as “No man is an island”

A second variation is simpler and maybe more poignant.

Finally, since I had created ambigram-designs for Nairobi and Beirut, here they are, just for the record. Note that Nairobi and Beirut are both chain ambigrams mapped onto a circle, i.e. they can be read both at the top and bottom of the circle. Enjoy