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.