Douglas Hofstadter is probably best known as the author of Gödel, Escher Bach, a classic of popular science writing published in 1979.
In 1983, he coined the word “ambigram”, meaning a piece of text that can be read in more than one way, an art form pioneered in the 1970s by the typographers Scott Kim and John Langdon. Typically, an ambigram is a word or phrase that has left-right mirror symmetry, or reads the same upside down.
Hofstadter, aged 80, is professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University, and has produced thousands of ambigrams over the decades. Here’s one that is pleasingly self-referential, taken from his latest book, Ambigrammia. It has a vertical line of symmetry through the “g”, which means you can read it left to right, and also in a mirror. The ‘ambi’ when reflected reads ‘rams’.
Illustration: Douglas Hofstadter
Here’s another one, geographically appropriate, that has 180 degree rotational symmetry. (It reads the same upside down.)
Illustration: Douglas Hofstadter
Isn’t it clever? The dots underneath the “r” and the “t” do not distract from the letters, but when upside down are clearly the dots on two “i”s.
Hofstadter describes each ambigram as a “pocket-sized creativity puzzle.” So I thought they would make a perfect challenge for this column.
Flipping words
Design an ambigram for the following words:
1. DAVE
2. OHIO
3. UTAH
4. RED
5. Your own name
The aim in an ambigram is legibility. You want the word to be as readable as possible. Usually an ambigram has perfect symmetry (mirror or rotational) as in the the two examples above, but not always, as in ‘GREEN’ in the top image.
You can use upper case, lower case, or a mixture of the two. You will need to experiment at first. How much you can tweak a letter without making it unrecognisable, and how much you can add without overwhelming the eye?
With DAVE, the A and the V are (almost) inversions of each other. Harder is to see how to make an E into an upside down D.
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with Hofstadter’s designs for 1 to 5. If you would like me to feature your designs of your names in that post, please either email me or tag me on Twitter or Bluesky.
Ambigrammia by Douglas Hofstadter, with an introduction by Scott Kim, is out now on Yale University Press
I’ve been setting a puzzle here on alternate Mondays since 2015. I’m always on the look-out for great puzzles. If you would like to suggest one, email me.