Ambigrams in Photoshop

By Dirk Metzmacher

Ambi means „all-sided“ – like the yin yang symbol. It’s perfectly symmetrical writing which can be turned or flipped and still looks exactly the same. They stand for perfect symmetry or even for signs full of wonder. This article shows you a technique how to do your own simple ambigram.

Signs full of wonder

„The corpse on the floor before Langdon was hideous. The late Leonardo lay on his back, stripped naked. Fighting a wave of nausea, Langdon let his eyes fall to the victim’s chest. The raised, broiled flesh was perfectly delineated… the symbol perfectly formed.“ This is what Dan Brown describes in his bestseller Angels & Demons. The symbol which the hero of that story admires here is an ambigram.

The test

If you turn your head a little, you’ll see the effect. Even better: Copy the image and open it in Photoshop. Use Image > Image Rotation to turn the workspace around 180 degrees. Nothing happens, of course. Nothing is meant to happen, because ambigrams are symmetrical. A true artist of „inversions“ is Scott Kim, by the way, who displays numerous examples on his website.

More examples

If you want to see even more ambigrams (and prepare to have your jaw dropped), surf over to JohnLangdon. On that website you’ll not only find all the ambigrams from the Angels and Demons book, but also logo examples and more ambigram artworks.

The basis

Now, to create an ambigram with Photoshop, you only need a few tools. The trick is to use a „squiggly“ font and a short word in the beginning. Anything else is too hard, although I’d be happy to stand corrected. The word „LAUT“ (“loud” in German) meets these conditions perfectly. It’s short and blessed with characters that have similarities when rotated. It makes work a little easier when the font size is about that in the example.

Wrong way

Copy the text layer, rotate it around 180 degrees and you’ll easily see that the results for this approach are anything but pretty. The shape is an ambigram, but you can hardly recognize the word LAUT. Improving this result and turning it into a legible ambigram would be much too hard.

T and L

Let’s have a look at the letters L and the turned T. Perhaps you can see some similarities. I didn’t choose the word LAUT for no reason in this example. If trimmed a little, both characters can be easily combined. For the U, the letter A was rotated via Edit > Transform > Rotate 180°, and then left just as it is, without further adjustments.

Subtleties

It made my work much easier that the distance between the letters (tracking) was a little wider up to now. For a better end result, you could move them closer together. You’d use the selection tool and then the move tool.

An example

As a little homage to the thriller Angels and Demons I prepared an imaginary victim in a collage. The writing was put in its own layer above the image, then its position was adjusted with Transform > Perspective. All burns are actual photos of real burn injuries. The smoke was created in Photoshop. For that, you create a new layer with Shift+Ctrl+N and then press D on the keyboard to get the standard colors. Use Filter > Render > Clouds, then give the layer a mask.

To do that, click on the Add Layer Mask button in the layer palette, then in the mask itself use the Cloud filter again. Apply the mask, then create another one. Use black color and a soft brush to erase the smoke, so it remains only where you want it.

If all you want to do is turn a word into an ambigram real quick, then visit the website ambigram.matic. Enter your word into the first field, confirm with „Go!“, then see how a simple ambigram is created. Another good page is www.flipscript.com. Enter your text, then click on „Create New Ambigram“ at the top right.