The Lost Works of Ambigram Magazine

Exhuming the record.

May 25, 2024

The art of the ambigram—a word or phrase designed so that it can be read in more than one way—has had its highs and lows over the years, but one high that’s at risk of disappearing from the record is the heyday of Ambigram.com—Ambigram Magazine.

The URL now redirects to FlipScript, where ambigram designer Mark Hunter shows a bit of his current work and his font-based solution to creating ambigrams at scale. Hunter recently demonstrated that AI image generators were still laughably poor at creating ambigrams (handling text of any kind seems to be a problem for most of them).

Still, the classic Ambigram Magazine is worth missing. A server crash knocked it offline in 2015, wiping out its archives. But even before then, the project basically ground to a halt in mid-2012. One of the final posts was Nikita Prokhorov announcing his retirement from the site, and he seems to have been the main driving force behind it: most of the posts were his, and some are his personal reminiscings. (Prokhorov now has a site of his own with a special portfolio category for his ambigram designs.)

But if the site went down before I got active in the wordplay scene, then how do I know this? Well, its older incarnations can be found thanks to archive.org. And while some image links are broken, the archive.org page from 2014 or so is still a treasure trove for lovers of ambigrammatic art.

Below is a sampling of the work Ambigram published in 2012, much of it from contests that drew mass participation by designers. (Please don’t reproduce for commercial use, as the rights rest with the pieces’ original designers—I’m only risking putting them on this free feed to draw some attention to their near-forgotten status.)

In future updates, I’ll see if I can track down Prokhorov, Hunter, and any others who have history with the site, to get a clearer picture of the history of the ambigram community.

HOLY SPIRIT (presented without clear attribution here):