yamnik-celebrating togetherness

This is a special gift for my sister and her husband on their marriage anniversary.

A very special thanks to Clayton Mabey who helped me to refine the design and make it more readable. The guy took just two minutes to rectify the design. He is a sheer genius.

A very happy anniversary to Yamini and Nikhil. Have a happy life ahead.

Throttle

The last post has been a total success. John Langdon, Co-inventor of the concept of ambigrams, the man who drew ambigrams for the famous novel 'Angels and Demons', Man behind 'Illuminati', commented on my previous blog. These images inspired me to dive into the world of ambigrams . It was truly an honor.

These comments made me create ambigrams with more vigour and enthusiasm. Now-a-days i am always on the lookout of words that are probable ambigrams. So you guys may see many more ambigrams coming your way.

Today's word is 'Throttle'. I had thought of this word a long time back. I had also created a hand made sketch of the word. But back then i had little knowledge of scanning and editing my ambigrams. So the Ambigram never got created. Yesterday as i was just thinking of words, the word Throttle crawled in my mind and i started drawing right at that moment.

The design circled mainly on the same path as the previous thought process. If you see at the word 'tt' make a 'h' and 'r' can easily made to look as 't'. 'o' being an natural just fitted in all the words. The challenge here was 'T' and 'E'. It was a bit difficult for me to fit these two words. I made a lot of combinations. But then finally narrowed it down the following design which looks pretty much attractive and readable. I made the 'o' look a bit different the original ones and thought of connecting it with 't' which was good. I scanned the image,painted it paint and then traced it in inkscape. This was quite easy because editing the traced image in inkscape is a tedious job. So this was quite easy and quick.

The next job was the colour thing. I wanted to make it look like a fiery word. It was not easy to put fire inside the word, so just put red and yellow colours at the end of the design. These colours complement the words meaning.

Its very important that you people keep on commenting on my blogs. They are very important for me. The legibility and the readability can be tested when many people try to comprehend the word.

So please keep commenting and checking out my blog.

Wizard

Harry Potter mania is gripping the whole world and i am not left out of that.This because of the epic finale that realised last Friday. J.K.Rowling has put a lot of effort in writing all these books and they are truly awesome. The suspense and the gripping story is so awesome that you just cant put down the book. Hats off to her.

So to add to this Potter mania i wanted to do an ambigram. Harry,Ron, Hermoine would be my probable candidates but I wanted it to stand out. Then I thought of the wizard and here i am with my design. I had thought of this word long back but for some reason i was not able to make it happen. Everything has a time and the time for 'Wizard' is now.

Let me run through the design process of this ambigram. 'D' and 'i' and make a 'w'. But the catch here is that it should not look like and 'm', it should look like 'rD'. So the work was cut out for me. No ready made fonts were useful. But yesterday as i was in the midst of all my office work it struck me. These days i carry my drawing book with me to the office. The 'r' and 'D' were perfectly fitted. It was the turn of 'iza'. Now here z is a natural ambigram so it would be ideal if we keep its design as it is. But somehow 'i' and 'a' were not fitting well. So why no combine 'i' and 'z' to make it an 'A'. This way preserving the 'z'.

Attractiveness was one of the most important factor of this design. The style must be consistent with the word. So i need to draw really curvy stuff and make it an medieval look. I think i have fairly achieved it. Next was the wand thing which made it look more attractive and meaning full. I drew the design traced it and converted it using the combination of GIMP and Inkscape. Fine tools. I browsed through the net and thought of putting sparks at the end of the wand. So thats that..

Let me tell you my friends, if you want to be a perfectionist you have to practice. The old saying is truly correct 'Practice makes man Perfect'

Comments are eagerly eagerly awaited

Evolution

Its been a long time since the last post. I have been very busy and didn't have a chance to create the ambigram. The Ambigram.com Ambigram challenges are keeping me in touch with the ambigram designs. These chaellenges are really awesome and it takes huge efforts to make it to the top 5. I have only participated in 1 challenge, not making it to the top 5 but lots to learn. Currently i am working on the new challenge. It has been fascinating to study the work of top ambigram designers via this ambigram challenges. Kudos to Ambigram.com team.

The word evolution was lingering in my mind since many days. I always keep a marker or a pencil with me so that i can try a word anytime it clicks to me. It helps a lot. This is a hand drawn design and then edited on a computer. The design was pretty straight forward. The main hick up here was to show 'v'. 'e' and 'v' can be clubbed to make an 'n'. This particular trick was pretty useful and the design was easily readable. Rest of the design was pretty simple.

The most important thing i wanted from this design was the readability, which i have fairly achieved. Other facet is the attractiveness, i am striving for this very hard. I am studying other designs from ambigramist. Through Ambigram challenges we get to learn a lot. I am also planning to learn typography to get better understanding of the type forms. One thing i have realised perfection is a process, you keep on learning newer things.

Thanks to inkscape and blogger.com.

Comments are highly appreciated.

Online

A year back I had decided to create theme based ambigrams and present them in front of you. 'Atom' was the first theme based ambigram and people appreciated it. After that i created hardly two more theme based ambigrams and i stopped doing it. Today i have come up with another of the theme based ambigram for the word 'Online'.

'Online', the word caught my attention when i was chatting on gtalk one day. I just saw the green dot and my name stating that i am online. So I thought why not make a ambigram out of it. I wanted use that green dot to gain more leverage on the understanding of the design. I had decided to use the dot as part of the ambigram.

If you see the word, it is far more a natural ambigram. 'Online', 'N' and 'N' are natural ambigram and 'l' can be adjusted well to look like an 'i'. With a small adjustment 'e' can pretty well look like an 'o'. As i had decided to include the green dot, i thought of making the 'o' as solid green dot. But this would give away the 'e' and would need to be adjusted else where. I didn't want to disturb the natural ambigrams. So after some thinking i decided to make the 'o' as pacman design, A sector of the 'o' can be cut and the 'o' would look like an 'e'. After few adjustments the design looked satisfying and was completed in very less time.

I am thinking of creating ambigrams out of 'busy' and 'away' words which has some resemblance with the words and appearance on gtalk.

Your comments and suggestions are highly awaited.

Designs are created,presented courtesy Inkscape,illustrator and blogger.net

Clayton - My Fellow Ambigramist

I have been itching to post a ambigram since a very long time. But apperently for some reason i was not able to post it. I have successfully created my first hand drawn, scanned and edited ambigram. People who are in my facebook friend list have seen the ambigram and have appreciated it. It is satisfactory to read positive feedback about my designs.Since then i have always craved for creating the hand drawn ambigrams instead of using inkscape and illustrator to draw it from the scratch. I use the tools for editing and adding some effects. The editing is a long process and i am getting a taste of it slowly.

Today i have come up with a ambigram of my ambigram mate 'Clayton'. I met Clayton on facebook and was instantly a fan of his designs. This guy is a creative genius. He has not only got custom ambigrams but also some ring designs of the words. Mind you creating ambigram rings is not easy and this guy creates them with awesome clarity and fascinating designs. We been friends since then and have been sharing a lot of stuff about ambigrams and art. It feels good to discuss about ambigram with a fellow artist.You can go through the following site to view his designs http://www.customambigrams.com/

The design took very less time to evolve. It took not more than 20 mins to complete the ambigram. The 'c' and 'l' can be connected to create a 'n' . 'o' can be transformed into an 'a' very easily. Now the 'y' can be made look as a 't' by writing the 't' in a cursive format and inverting it. The design was clear and concise. I had created this on a paper so the next task was to scan it and edit it. The editing part took a very long time. I made a lot of changes to the design. Every single time i was not satisfied with the design. But finally after a long time I was able to complete it and put in the front of you. Finally today it was ready to upload.

Thanks to blogger,inkscape and illustrator. Wonderful tools.

Eagerly awaiting your comments.

Spots

Evolution and innovation are the key to success and progress. These two things are interlinked. Evolution comes with innovation and innovation come with evolution. Evolution is in connection with human kind since a very long time. We have been evolved from a very less thought power to the human beings with the best brains that you will ever find. These brains help in innovation and new ideas. So in a way as i said they are interlinked with each other.

The whole point of writing about evolution and innovation is that my designs have been evolved thought innovation. If you compare my previous designs to the ones that i create now, they have evolved over the period of time. They have been more polished and finished. As a part of innovation i have come with the 'theme based ambigrams', which were really different that those contempory ambigrams. This all has happened over a period of time. I have experienced both evolution and innovation through my designs and i am sure you might have experienced it too.

Today i would like to present in front of you a very different ambigram, spots. I was making an ambigram of the word 'sports', I had just finished the design and 'spots' clicked me. I decided to post this ambigram before i would publish sports. I had a clear and concise design in my mind right from the start.

If you look at the design it is pretty much simple. 's' and 's' are natural ambigrams. 'o' clubbed with 't' makes an inverted 'p'. So in a way it is natural ambigram. I did not invest much time in creating the final draft of the design.The alignment of the words is so crisp that the ambigram looks really nice.

The next which i did to add flavour to this design is i added effects. Viewers wouldn't have seen these effects before in my designs. Recently i have started using 'Adobe illustrator'. The tool is really great. It gives you more options to make the design attractive. I used the 'grains' effect to add those grains which look more like spots.I am yet to explore the complete functionality of the tool. I would really like to use the tool to the fullest.

So the effect helped me to present the word with a meaning, The spots in the design help in explaining the word. So it more or less like a theme based ambigram. I was very happy with the final outcome of the ambigram. My whole effort is to make the ambigram readable and attractive. Readability will improve with practice and experience. Tools like Adobe Illustrator help the designer add this facet to the design.

I would like to specially thank the Adobe team in making such a powerful tool. Thanks again.

Please post your replies and suggestions in the comments tab. Your feedback would be appreciated.

Mumbai

Nikita Prokhorov is an avid artist and an ambigramist. He was the person who was instrumental in letting me know about the tool inkscape . He has come up with a great site called http://www.ambigram.com/ . It is a very good platform for people who have artistic interests and are ready to jump into the world of ambigrams. It is an ambigram devoted site.

He is currently hositing ambigram challenges. So what is a challenge? A theme is announced on the website and depending on the theme the person has to come up with his own ambigram design. There was a particular challenge in which you had to submit an ambigram of a city you love the most. The Challenge deadline was already over, but to test my skills and creativity I thought of making an ambigram of the word ‘Mumbai’.

Why Mumbai?? Because Mumbai is the city which never sleeps, millions of people shift to Mumbai to try their luck. Personally I love Mumbai for its night life, marine drive, trains, cricket, fast paced life, unlimited eating joints, the monsoon, Posh localities diversity, the never say die attitude and millions of opportunities the city offers. So I thought of dedicating an ambigram for this amazing city.

I was just wondering from where to start. So I just wrote ‘mumbai’ the calligraphy pen on the pseudo drawing board provided by inkscape. Looking at the words the concept just flowed from the brain to the computer. This is a classic ambigram which has a lot of natural ambigramatic letters in it. ‘mumbai’, the ‘a’ and ‘i’ align themselves so well that when inverted they make a perfect ‘m’. The inkscape calligraphy pen was helping me in getting the results which I wanted. With some efforts I was able to complete the ‘a’,’I’ and ‘m’. The middle ‘m’ can be directly made an ambigram. I used the stroke of ‘I’ to make the ‘m’. 3 similar strokes of ‘I’ made a perfect ‘m’ which would look the same when viewed upside down.

The next challenge was the ‘u’ and ‘b’ transformation. This part of the ambigram took a long time to evolve. The absence of a stroke on top of ‘u’ was making it look as ‘h’ rather than ‘b’ when viewed upside down. I wanted to make the letter look same as the other letters in the word. I didn’t want to risk the readability of the ambigram. So it was very important the design should be complete in every sense. After a long time of doodling, changes, adjustments and some final touches the ambigram was finally complete. The satisfaction after the completion was just awesome.

Please post your comments and reviews. This will make me introspect and create better designs in the future. Thanks again to Inkscape and Blogger.

Tornado

We can feel the change in the climate. Temperatures are dipping down,blue skies are occupied by dense dark clouds,the surroundings are getting greener day by day.Most of us are eagerly awaiting the arrival of rains, few lucky have already got the taste of it. This is an ideal and perfect weather to sit back,relax,have a mug of hot coffee,probably music or a novel to go with it and just enjoy the awesome weather.
Yesterday when i published a post, i wanted to post one more ambigram. I was not getting to a word. As i was returning from my friends place this morning and out of nowehere the word tornado caught my attention. I was dying to get my hands on Inkscape.
The 't' and 'o' was the first challenge which i tackled on my way itself. I knew i had an 'o' on the other side so it was only a matter of adjusting the 't' besides the 'o' which was not a big issue.If you look at the design closely, I have made use of a single rectangle with curved edges to complete it. The 't' and 'o' forced me do the ambigram out of this single shape. This was required to make the design uniform and attractive.
The next test was to make 'rnad' to look as 'danr'. I first thought of using the small 'r' and 'd'. But the design was looking clumsy. So i thought of using the capital 'R' and small 'd'. The bottom stroke of 'R' was only required to be added to the inverted 'd'. The rectangles helped me here as the letters 'd' and 'R' were synchronous with 't' and 'O'.
If you look at 'a' and 'n' they are natural ambigrams. But the style of these letter is not helpful here. So i had to come up with a different design. After a lot of thinking and doodling, i decided to make use of the captial 'N' and capital 'A'. The rectangles helped to come with this design.I used the half part of 'N' to look like an 'A', thus making it in sync with the other letters. After few final touches and changes the design was complete. I want to check the readability of the ambigram so i asked my friend (yash) to view it. He intantly typed 'Tornado' and i was elated. Readability was scruitinized.
Making the ambigrams makes me so happy and when the person viewing it reads it, the feeling is just awesome. I would like to express my gratitude towards Inkscape and blogger who gave me the pulpit to help me reach the viewers.

Eagerly awaiting the comments.

Ambiguity

Its been such a long time since i have posted any artwork. It is almost 3 months since the last ambigram. During this time i have created very less number of ambigrams. I have created some logos in and around, but they were not worth posting. This is an ambigram devoted blog so i would ideally not want to post logos.

Ambigram was the source to the word Ambiguity. This word caught my mind really quickly and i decided to turn this word into an ambigram. This a first ambigram created on my Sony Vaio laptop. :) :)

The middle word 'big' is a natural ambigram. So ideally i didn't want to touch these words. Initially i had fixated on two designs with a small 'a' to be used rather than a capital 'A'. It was very hard to use the small 'a' to look as a 'y' when viewed upside down. After almost 2 days a thought crossed my mind to use the 'y'(small) to view as a 'A' when viewed upside down. There were no ambiguities in my mind to use this design and it looked just perfect.

The next big task was to turn 'uit' into a 'm'. Here lied a challenge because if u try to make use of 'u' and 'i' it perfectly took shape of an 'm'. But the 't' would be left as an orphan. Frustration of not coming to design was taking over me. I decided to club all the three letters together and try to hide the letter 'i' in the 'm'. But my efforts were not gaining any fruits. I reduced the length of 'u' and brought 'i' closer to it. I inserted a line between 'u' and 'i'. Alligning the 't' close to the 'i' was not that hard. After some changes and upadets a furnished 'uit' to 'm' was created successfully. At the end i added the same line (in a reduced length) to the centre of 'y' to make it look like an 'A'.

Finally the ambigram was complete and it was looking gorgeous. This ambigram actually required a lot of creative thinking. The readability of the ambigram had to be perfect. Another aspect would be attractiveness which is also fairly good. All in all a good result in the end.

Thanks to Inkscape and Blogspot.

Three Musketeers Part - II - 'aramis'

Life has really changed from the last post and what it is right now. Life has shown different colours from the time since last post. These three months has reassured me that life offers tons of learnings at every point of your life.


To continue with serious that i started on 1st of january 2010, let me put forward the second ambigram in the 'Three Musketeers series'. The word is 'aramis'. It is the name of one of the musketeers. The three musketeers has got a correlation with my life and this devoted to one of my closest person in my life. The three musketeers is related to my 2 friends and me. It was the best time that we had spend together.

The design took a long time to evolve. I had finalised on 3 designs but the designs lacked clarity. I have added a new step in the ambigram creation these days. I get the design scrutinized from
the third person. Perception of each human being is different because everybody is unique in this world and no person can be compared with the other because in turn you are direspecting both of them. My ambigrams are readable to me but they cannot be easily read by other people. The clarity of the design is the most important thing in the ambigram design.

The hardest part about this design was 'a' and 's'. This is the only reason i had to create 3 designs and had to settle down on the fourth. The word 'rami' are easy to convert to a ambigram. The design for these word was confirmed in the 1st version. I had searched a lot for the transformation of a to look as a s. But finally i came this transformation that i have user here. It actually fits well in this design. The cursive typecast makes it more attractive and readable.


So that the second part of the 'Three musketeers series'. The second part took a lot time to come up but i am going to complete the series very soon. So stay tuned for the next part in the series.

To say the least i am thankful to Inkscape and blogpost who gave me the opportunity to showcase this unique art.

The musketeers :- Part I

Its been a long time since i have posted anything on my blog. Actually i didn't have any legitimate design that i could post. I was actually not in the mood of posting :).

Today is 1st January, 1st day of the year 2010. A brand new year with new hopes, aspirations
and a barrage of new opportunities life can offer. We need to grab every possible opportunity that comes our way.

The following series of the 'The musketeers' posts is very special and close to my heart.
So without further adue, let me put forward the first ambigram called 'Athos'.

This design took quite a long time to materialise due to two things, first lack of a PC and second being dubious about the design. I fiddled with this design for quite a long time. Reason being all the letters expect 'H'.I was just not able to make design the letters. I was not coming to concrete design.

But just as i was scribbling on my work desk as i always do, something struck my mind and i was able to make this ambigram. First hurdle to complete this design was the letters 'A' and 's'. As i overcame this hurdle, the next thing on my mind was the letters 'o' and 't'. I have never done these letters look in the same way upside down. I searched a lot on the net but i couldn't get any markers to create it.But then fortune favours the brave, i was able to make the design using some of my innovative techniques.

There is one unique thing about this design. This design has evovled from a single rectangle with rounded edges. I have used a single rectangle to design all the letters of the word. This is really uncanny for me.

I hope you like this design and stay tuned for my next post in this series.
Thanks to inkscape.com.