Yesterday was International Coffee Day. In celebration (one day late but hey... ) here is a new ambigram for coffee. Enjoy.
The blame (& praise) game continues
I have shared earlier a design for a reflection ambigram for the two words "praise" and "blame" - where one word becomes another when reflected in a mirror. In fact the design has been printed in 3D. As it turns out this was a design that I had made many years ago -...
Ambigrams animated: 3 new designs
I love creating ambigrams, words written in such a manner that they can be read from multiple perspective - rotated, reflected and so on. These designs are much easier to "grasp" when printed on paper since you can actually turn the paper around, hold it against a...
International Literacy Day, new ambigram
In celebration of International Literacy Day, here is a new ambigram design - it reads, "Literacy" one way and "Reading" the other! Enjoy. See below for an attempt to use CSS to use to make the rotation automatic when you move your cursor over the image. Check it out....
Happy Teacher’s Day (new ambigrams)
September 5 is Teacher's Day in India. It is celebrated on the birthdate of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and statesman who was also the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He famously said, "teachers should be the best minds in the...
Soham starts college, new ambigram,
We dropped off my eldest at the University of Michigan today. He begins the next stage of his life. We couldn't be more excited. Here is a new ambigram design to mark this occasion. Soham whichever way you look at it, with UMich colors! Mouseover the image to rotate...
Art is a lie… that tells the truth
Picasso famously said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." This design below is my attempt to represent this quote - at least the first part of the quote. Of course, as most things go, it is not clear whether Picasso ever actually said these specific words. But...
Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3
Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...
Ambigrams in new book
The Art of Deception: Illusions to Challenge the Eye and the Mind is a new book edited by Brad Honeycutt. Brad is a graduate of Michigan State (Go Spartans!) and maintains a blog (anopticalillusion) devoted to optical illusions. A few of my designs have ended up on...
Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry
Ambigram for Symmetry displaying rotational symmetry I have been writing a series of articles for At Right Angles (a mathematics education magazine) with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar on the art and mathematics of ambigrams. The first article in the series (Of Art and...
Who wrote this poem?
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago and there...
New ambigram: Motivation
Just as the subject line says, new ambigram design this time for the word "motivation"
Symmetry: new ambigram
I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...
Curt becomes Bonk (and vice versa)
Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Curt is one of the most fun academics I know. He is also a good friend. That's us at the COSN conference earlier this year. What I didn't remember was that...
Algebra, version 2
I had posted yesterday a new ambigram for the word "algebra." It was a mirror-reflection design i.e. it reads the same when reflected in a mirror. What I liked about the design was the fact that it actually looks like an algebraic equation with a left-hand-side and a...
New ambigram, Algebra
I have been thinking about the relationship between ambigrams and mathematics - instigated in no small part by an email conversation with Gaurav Bhatnagar. That inspired me to create ambigrams of words that are related to mathematics. There are a few ideas percolating...
New Gandhi ambigram
The quest for a better design continues... Much better, I think, than my previous attempt
New ambigrams for AERA
I was invited to give two talks at the the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. One was a Ignite presentation (5 minutes, 20 slides set to move at 15 seconds per slide), and the other was an ED Talk (sort of like a TED talk...
4 new ambigrams (STEM, STEAM, Research & Gandhi)
Here are four new ambigrams I have created over the past few days. All related in some ways to things I have been thinking about. The first two are for STEM (an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) and STEAM (Science, Technology,...
Sternberg: New ambigram
A new ambigram for Robert Sternberg, psychologist.
New ambigram book, with 3 of my designs
Ambigrams Revealed: A Graphic Designer's Guide To Creating Typographic Art Using Optical Illusions, Symmetry, and Visual Perception is a new book edited by Nikita Prokhorov. The book showcases the works of ambigram artists from around the world. It includes...
My Illusions on the web
There are a couple of websites that feature work done by me. I had written earlier about Brad Honeycutt's website An Optical Illusion at (http://www.anopticalillusion.com/). He now features four different ambigrams created by me: You can find them on this page on his...
Happy Valentine’s Day (new ambigram)
A quick and dirty ambigram for Valentine's day, scribbled on the back of an envelope (literally), and photographed using my phone! Have a great day everybody 🙂
Dancing with words, Good/Evil in a new ambigram context
Many years ago I constructed an ambigram for the words "good" and "evil." The idea came to me while waiting for a traffic light to turn green. The memory of it is so vivid in my mind that even today when I come to that particular intersection I remember that moment...
New ambigrams, Mert-Demir and one more…
I recently received an email with the following request: I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my...
Good Evil Ambigram
Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of...
Ambigrams on the web
Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider...
The gift that keeps on giving, or Why I love the web
I recently received this email: Dear Mr. Mishra, I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to...
Triplet from China
The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous...
New triplet Ambigram (Now in 3D)!
A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here's a triplet ambigram that casts three...