More Lost Ambigrams (1 of 6)

Starting with the most appropriate one ever.

This simple series is here to shed light on the best of the ambigram designs spotlighted at Ambigram.com, a site that now only exists on the Internet Archive. The first of these is a logo for the original site itself…

The site declined to mention who designed this one, making it available under a Creative Commons license as long as the source—ambigram.com—was identified. (It probably wasn’t Nikita Prokhorov, who was welcomed to the site the following month.)

The earliest posts on the site included some of the history of ambigrams, including the oldest “non-natural” one by Peter Newell, ending his 1893 book Topsys and Turvys. The word PUZZLE becomes THE END when flipped over, with clue text lining the top and bottom to guide readers into the trick: “And now appears a mystic word, but if it be inverted, / We find the ending of this book in plainest text asserted.”

Some old-fashioned Z’s there, but they really turn nicely into E’s!

Other ambigrams featured in ambigram.com were more contemporary. Here’s a Wired article title designed by Scott Kim with rotational symmetry:

“John Mayer” by Nikita Prokhorov:

To be continued!