5 ms·

Ambigr.am

322 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

colesantiago 1y ago
The Sun Microsystems logo is one of the most famous (and my personal favorite) ambigram logos. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_log...
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  :-O TIL or rather today I saw the letters there for the first time. Just thought it was S's all these years! Nice one
- merelysounds 1y ago
  Interestingly, rotational ambigrams can also occur naturally, e.g. “OHIO”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram#/media/File%3AAmbigram_OHIO_(90_degrees_rotational_symmetry_-_animated).gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram#/media/File%3AAmbigra...
emil-lp 1y ago
Related: Ambigrammia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692118
0wis 1y ago
Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ? A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.
- ares623 1y ago
  Building one is definitely a puzzle. And trying to read it upside down/flipped without actually flipping it is also a kind of puzzle (i.e. like trying to run a compilation in your head, trying to see in your mind first before "running"/"compiling" the program). They're also like the made-up language from the movie Arrival. You kind of need to know the end and the beginning at the same time. I wonder how good GenAI is in generating ambigrams. I know they're very good in generating those visual illusions of having a face in a landscape. Perhaps that can be the next "Pelican test" once the Pelican test has been completely absorbed in training.
- smusamashah 1y ago
  Image Diffusion models are already capable of this. There was a research paper and I believe model was released as well, which ch generates visual illusions where an image when flipped becomes something else. Same idea here. A text needs to be diffused from two views until it looks the same but still matches the input. It might already exist. Edit: https://diffusionillusions.com/ https://diffusionillusions.com/ Edit: Ambigram using Diffusion models https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/ https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
Ha! that was my first dumb idea when i read about your problem as well. Amazing that it actually worked
yreg 1y ago
Maybe it's not possible for all character pairs, but we could have a font-face with plenty of possible pairs and render them as ligatures. AD -> render an A that looks like a D when viewed upside down DA -> render the same character in the other orientation Then to use the font you need to carefully construct palindromes out of the supported pairs. Of course copy-pasting this would be a pita, accessibility would be non-existent, but could be fun for print and such.
- arthurcolle 1y ago
  This is a cool idea!
- rbits 1y ago
  That probably exists somewhere as software, but probably not as ligatures in a font. That sounds cool. Would definitely be limiting on which words you could make a readable ambigram though, because many ambigrams rely on letters that aren't one-to-one mappings (one letter becomes two, or letters between letters, etc.)
- penteract 1y ago
  Fonts can be complicated. Using nonsense like [1] (specifically contextual alternates), you could have the glyph for the first letter of a word depend on the last letter. I don't think you could get that to work for all letters in an arbitrary length word, but making a font that works for all words shorter than say 20 characters should be doable. [1] https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-highlighting/ https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...
Ruphin 1y ago
One of my favorite ambigrams is the title logo from an old 1995 PC game classic, Tyrian. It's so subtle I never realised until a few years ago. You can find the logo here, along with the excellent soundtrack: https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-soundtrack https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-...
- yoz-y 1y ago
  I’ve played and finished that game a dozen times and never realized this! Thanks!
tantalor 1y ago
Broken website? Just spins forever.
65 1y ago
Ambigrams are a random useless talent I have. I'm able to write backwards and upside down as well for whatever reason. I hypothesized it's because I'm left handed.
- schoen 1y ago
  That's usually called "mirror writing", but it's a different concept. If you look closely at these examples, you'll see that the letter forms are carefully chosen so that the texts are still readable as normal under symmetry (unlike regular text). This is done by creating letter forms that can be interpreted as other letter forms under symmetry, similar to the u and n being interpreted as each other's inverted forms. These ambigrammists are making designs in which more pairs of letters have that kind of relationship.
  - 65 1y ago
    Yep, I've always had a really easy time making ambigrams because of my (natural) mirror writing ability. As in, one day I tried mirror writing and I could just... do it without hesitation. I have asked a few left handed and right handed friends of mine to make ambigrams, or do mirror writing, and it's quite interesting how easy it is for left handed people compared to right handed people.
    - schoen 1y ago
      Oh sorry, I thought you were conflating the two because the talent you described was for mirror writing. I'm also left-handed and learned belatedly that I can do mirror-writing with my non-dominant right hand. I'm not that coordinated with that hand, so the writing is a bit messy, but it doesn't seem to require noticeable extra cognitive effort to do the mirroring. I could also pretty easily read upside down or backwards from around the time I learned to read. However, I've never found it easy to make ambigrams!
jonah 1y ago
I was first introduced to Ambigrams many years ago when Scott Kim was working on some game projects with one company I was at and then did the logo for another company. https://www.scottkim.com/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/blog/categories/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/blog/categories/ambigrams
- quuxplusone 1y ago
  Scott Kim also did ambigrammatic poster designs for "Martin Gardner's Celebration of Mind" for art least four years running: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/18/scott-kim-gardner-ambigrams/ https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/18/scott-kim-gard...
spankalee 1y ago
I really don't understand this site. What is it?
- azundo 1y ago
  Ambigrams can be read right side up and rotated by 180 degrees (sometimes other rotations also exist). Some of the ones here say the same thing when turned, and some say a different, usually related, word or phrase.
  - spankalee 1y ago
    Now the site makes sense. There was no content on it before and no explanation of what the site was. Just a leader board with this AM logo thing... Edit: well, on reload, it's blank again.
  - stevefan1999 1y ago
    Ah so it's like anagrams
    - jachee 1y ago
      Like a cross between anagrams and palindromes. Most of the images on the site are interactable, and doing so will help visualize the various ways you get multiple meanings from a single "gram".
sert_121 1y ago
is this supposed to be feed only for ambigrams? or more of a contest?
desireco42 1y ago
I love the idea but I love the site design even more. So refreshing to see something like this. Simple yet original.
- ambigramKai 1y ago
  Hey that's my website! It was actually my first website and I wanted it to look good so I appreciate the compliment. I had no idea what I was doing so I just went with the minimalist trend - picked 2 colours and 2 sans serif fonts and stuck with that.
becomevocal 1y ago
For a few years, many many years ago, I helped build the sites for wowtattoos.com and redchapterclothing.com which uses the artwork of Mark Palmer. He's the real deal! Awesome person too Back in 2008-ish the site could generate ambigrams for you too. It was powered by an algo that pieced together a large set of hand drawn glyphs. PHP at it's best :D https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtattoos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtat...
hackerbeat 1y ago
By the way, I love https://wordgag.com/ https://wordgag.com/ - brings me a lot of joy everyday.
cwmoore 1y ago
up dn
rbits 1y ago
Love this! My favourites: The winner of this: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings And every single submission for this is amazing: https://ambigr.am/contest/duality https://ambigr.am/contest/duality Also nice tip: You can click on the image and it will flip it for you. Especially useful if viewing on a computer, and also because some of them mirror instead of flip.
- lIl-IIIl 1y ago
  I don't really get this one: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings. The "up" is supposed to turn to "do" but I don't recognize neither the "d" nor the "o".
  - Ukv 1y ago
    Took me a moment too - it's a capital 'D', at about the same angle as the second 'm'. The 'O' just has an extraneous line through it (which was the stem of the P).
- ambigramKai 1y ago
  Maybe you would like this one: https://ambigr.am/post/sun--moon-poems https://ambigr.am/post/sun--moon-poems It's the longest ambigram in the world, 2 poems. You read the first poem then turn it over and read the second!
jihadjihad 1y ago
I was confused at first because in my memory “ambigram” and “rebus” got mixed up, and I couldn’t figure out what was so hard to decipher about “What goes up, must come down.” Being able to tap to rotate is sweet!
mikewarot 1y ago
Just yesterday I was listening to a story about a language that was meant to convey multiple viewpoint with the same writing by simply looking at it from different angles. I referenced ambigrams as a possible starting point for actually doing it. Quite the coincidence. If someone actually pulled it off, you could test the Sapir Whorf hypothesis rather easily.
- mikewarot 1y ago
  FYI: Here's the video in question, more than likely it's AI generated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXZUeYKC_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXZUeYKC_Sc
elijahcarrel 1y ago
The princess bride DVD cover blew my mind as a kid. Still does actually. One of the best of the genre. https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/THE-PRINCESS-BRIDE-11x17-Framed-Movie-Poster_6b2f59d6-2708-4cb3-a733-ae30406f2f01.35ae79d73aae53a041b84b14574060cc.jpeg https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/THE-PRINCESS-BRIDE-11x17-Fr...
- small_scombrus 1y ago
  How have I never looked at the DVD cover close enough to notice that!?
Jotalea 1y ago
I never knew this even existed and now I really like it.

322 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

The Sun Microsystems logo is one of the most famous (and my personal favorite) ambigram logos. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_log...

ChrisArchitect 1y ago
:-O TIL or rather today I saw the letters there for the first time. Just thought it was S's all these years! Nice one
merelysounds 1y ago
Interestingly, rotational ambigrams can also occur naturally, e.g. “OHIO”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram#/media/File%3AAmbigram_OHIO_(90_degrees_rotational_symmetry_-_animated).gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram#/media/File%3AAmbigra...

emil-lp 1y ago

Related: Ambigrammia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692118

0wis 1y ago

Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ? A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.

ares623 1y ago
Building one is definitely a puzzle. And trying to read it upside down/flipped without actually flipping it is also a kind of puzzle (i.e. like trying to run a compilation in your head, trying to see in your mind first before "running"/"compiling" the program). They're also like the made-up language from the movie Arrival. You kind of need to know the end and the beginning at the same time. I wonder how good GenAI is in generating ambigrams. I know they're very good in generating those visual illusions of having a face in a landscape. Perhaps that can be the next "Pelican test" once the Pelican test has been completely absorbed in training.
smusamashah 1y ago
Image Diffusion models are already capable of this. There was a research paper and I believe model was released as well, which ch generates visual illusions where an image when flipped becomes something else. Same idea here. A text needs to be diffused from two views until it looks the same but still matches the input. It might already exist. Edit: https://diffusionillusions.com/ https://diffusionillusions.com/ Edit: Ambigram using Diffusion models https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/ https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/

qwertytyyuu 1y ago

Ha! that was my first dumb idea when i read about your problem as well. Amazing that it actually worked

yreg 1y ago

Maybe it's not possible for all character pairs, but we could have a font-face with plenty of possible pairs and render them as ligatures. AD -> render an A that looks like a D when viewed upside down DA -> render the same character in the other orientation Then to use the font you need to carefully construct palindromes out of the supported pairs. Of course copy-pasting this would be a pita, accessibility would be non-existent, but could be fun for print and such.

arthurcolle 1y ago
This is a cool idea!
rbits 1y ago
That probably exists somewhere as software, but probably not as ligatures in a font. That sounds cool. Would definitely be limiting on which words you could make a readable ambigram though, because many ambigrams rely on letters that aren't one-to-one mappings (one letter becomes two, or letters between letters, etc.)
penteract 1y ago
Fonts can be complicated. Using nonsense like [1] (specifically contextual alternates), you could have the glyph for the first letter of a word depend on the last letter. I don't think you could get that to work for all letters in an arbitrary length word, but making a font that works for all words shorter than say 20 characters should be doable. [1] https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-highlighting/ https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...

Ruphin 1y ago

One of my favorite ambigrams is the title logo from an old 1995 PC game classic, Tyrian. It's so subtle I never realised until a few years ago. You can find the logo here, along with the excellent soundtrack: https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-soundtrack https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-...

yoz-y 1y ago
I’ve played and finished that game a dozen times and never realized this! Thanks!

tantalor 1y ago

Broken website? Just spins forever.

65 1y ago

Ambigrams are a random useless talent I have. I'm able to write backwards and upside down as well for whatever reason. I hypothesized it's because I'm left handed.

schoen 1y ago
That's usually called "mirror writing", but it's a different concept. If you look closely at these examples, you'll see that the letter forms are carefully chosen so that the texts are still readable as normal under symmetry (unlike regular text). This is done by creating letter forms that can be interpreted as other letter forms under symmetry, similar to the u and n being interpreted as each other's inverted forms. These ambigrammists are making designs in which more pairs of letters have that kind of relationship.
- 65 1y ago
  Yep, I've always had a really easy time making ambigrams because of my (natural) mirror writing ability. As in, one day I tried mirror writing and I could just... do it without hesitation. I have asked a few left handed and right handed friends of mine to make ambigrams, or do mirror writing, and it's quite interesting how easy it is for left handed people compared to right handed people.
  - schoen 1y ago
    Oh sorry, I thought you were conflating the two because the talent you described was for mirror writing. I'm also left-handed and learned belatedly that I can do mirror-writing with my non-dominant right hand. I'm not that coordinated with that hand, so the writing is a bit messy, but it doesn't seem to require noticeable extra cognitive effort to do the mirroring. I could also pretty easily read upside down or backwards from around the time I learned to read. However, I've never found it easy to make ambigrams!

jonah 1y ago

I was first introduced to Ambigrams many years ago when Scott Kim was working on some game projects with one company I was at and then did the logo for another company. https://www.scottkim.com/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/blog/categories/ambigrams https://www.scottkim.com/blog/categories/ambigrams

quuxplusone 1y ago
Scott Kim also did ambigrammatic poster designs for "Martin Gardner's Celebration of Mind" for art least four years running: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/18/scott-kim-gardner-ambigrams/ https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/18/scott-kim-gard...

spankalee 1y ago

I really don't understand this site. What is it?

azundo 1y ago
Ambigrams can be read right side up and rotated by 180 degrees (sometimes other rotations also exist). Some of the ones here say the same thing when turned, and some say a different, usually related, word or phrase.
- spankalee 1y ago
  Now the site makes sense. There was no content on it before and no explanation of what the site was. Just a leader board with this AM logo thing... Edit: well, on reload, it's blank again.
- stevefan1999 1y ago
  Ah so it's like anagrams
  - jachee 1y ago
    Like a cross between anagrams and palindromes. Most of the images on the site are interactable, and doing so will help visualize the various ways you get multiple meanings from a single "gram".

sert_121 1y ago

is this supposed to be feed only for ambigrams? or more of a contest?

desireco42 1y ago

I love the idea but I love the site design even more. So refreshing to see something like this. Simple yet original.

ambigramKai 1y ago
Hey that's my website! It was actually my first website and I wanted it to look good so I appreciate the compliment. I had no idea what I was doing so I just went with the minimalist trend - picked 2 colours and 2 sans serif fonts and stuck with that.

becomevocal 1y ago

For a few years, many many years ago, I helped build the sites for wowtattoos.com and redchapterclothing.com which uses the artwork of Mark Palmer. He's the real deal! Awesome person too Back in 2008-ish the site could generate ambigrams for you too. It was powered by an algo that pieced together a large set of hand drawn glyphs. PHP at it's best :D https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtattoos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtat...

hackerbeat 1y ago

By the way, I love https://wordgag.com/ https://wordgag.com/ - brings me a lot of joy everyday.

cwmoore 1y ago

up dn

rbits 1y ago

Love this! My favourites: The winner of this: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings And every single submission for this is amazing: https://ambigr.am/contest/duality https://ambigr.am/contest/duality Also nice tip: You can click on the image and it will flip it for you. Especially useful if viewing on a computer, and also because some of them mirror instead of flip.

lIl-IIIl 1y ago
I don't really get this one: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings. The "up" is supposed to turn to "do" but I don't recognize neither the "d" nor the "o".
- Ukv 1y ago
  Took me a moment too - it's a capital 'D', at about the same angle as the second 'm'. The 'O' just has an extraneous line through it (which was the stem of the P).
ambigramKai 1y ago
Maybe you would like this one: https://ambigr.am/post/sun--moon-poems https://ambigr.am/post/sun--moon-poems It's the longest ambigram in the world, 2 poems. You read the first poem then turn it over and read the second!

jihadjihad 1y ago

I was confused at first because in my memory “ambigram” and “rebus” got mixed up, and I couldn’t figure out what was so hard to decipher about “What goes up, must come down.” Being able to tap to rotate is sweet!

mikewarot 1y ago

Just yesterday I was listening to a story about a language that was meant to convey multiple viewpoint with the same writing by simply looking at it from different angles. I referenced ambigrams as a possible starting point for actually doing it. Quite the coincidence. If someone actually pulled it off, you could test the Sapir Whorf hypothesis rather easily.

mikewarot 1y ago
FYI: Here's the video in question, more than likely it's AI generated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXZUeYKC_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXZUeYKC_Sc

elijahcarrel 1y ago

The princess bride DVD cover blew my mind as a kid. Still does actually. One of the best of the genre. https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/THE-PRINCESS-BRIDE-11x17-Framed-Movie-Poster_6b2f59d6-2708-4cb3-a733-ae30406f2f01.35ae79d73aae53a041b84b14574060cc.jpeg https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/THE-PRINCESS-BRIDE-11x17-Fr...

small_scombrus 1y ago
How have I never looked at the DVD cover close enough to notice that!?

Jotalea 1y ago

I never knew this even existed and now I really like it.