The Italian company Sawaya Moroni in collaboration with designer/programmer John Maeda, using his algorithmic “Fireball” graphic. Photo above by renzo358 from the Abitare Il Tempo 2009 in Verona.

This post is for Paul, who recently pointed out that the “ouno” logo above is an ambigram and who suggested looking at the work of Scott Kim (who made the two animated ambigrams above and below). I did know that “ouno” was the same right-side up as upside down – it was partly chosen for that – but I didn’t know there was a name for this phenomenon. “An ambigram is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction, or orientation.” The word “ouno” is the simplest type of ambigram, involving only a flipped image (this one is a 180° vertical rotation – doesn’t work on a 180° horizontal rotation, like, say, “ovo”). A more complicated type of ambigram can actually be read in two different ways at once, as in Nikita Prokhorov’s “Clean Dirty” below, and in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s perceptual shift ambigram at bottom, a play on the wave–particle duality of light. (If you can’t see the word “wave,” stand back a bit from the monitor.) Hofstadter, author of Godel Escher Bach, is responsible for coining the term ambigram. Scott Kim’s play on figure and ground, above, is interesting because the ground continually becomes the figure. He’d originally intended to make an ambigram with the words “figure” and “ground,” but then realized it was more interesting this way, because in fact there is no ground, only figure, with the ground always becoming the figure. His piece directly below (use the slider bar) is a play on designer John Maeda’s name. If you do a Google Image search for “ambigram” you’ll notice that most of them tend to have a predictable Celtic/medieval/heavy-metal/tattoo aesthetic; what’s nice about Scott’s ambigrams is that he’s not stuck in that generic style. Anyway, thanks to Paul for being the first person in five years to recognize the geek component of the ouno logo.