Where can I find a John Langdon book?

Ahhh, ambigrams. I believe some of these can be found in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas.

For bj:



I hope you can read it. It's got some awkward spots, but it's
sometimes unavoidable with these things. I'm sure it could
be improved, but I gotta stop myself before I fritter away
any more time. (As if I've got nothing better to do... Sheesh. :-)

You're welcome.

These things can be pretty absorbing to work on. They're a
kind of puzzle, but you often don't know if a satisfying
solution even exists.

Blackletter is well suited to ambigrams due its many
ambiguous forms. In this case, it also happened fit the
words in a rather perverse way.

rereading this, the words didn't come out quite right ;;;

What I meant was the word 'typophile' looks to be
more difficult than a word like this
because of the particular letter pairings.

granted, this solution is pedestrian...


bj

holeee....

Tiffany, does the Langdon book have tips and tricks?

This is like Hunter S. Thompson typography,
gonzo type...

>> Aww hell! I was going to post something about this on Typographi.ca.

Dyana, please, post something at t'graphica! Totally.
Share this work with as many people as possible.

btw, I can't be credited with a scoop, I first saw it at YH*,
as mentioned in the first post.

And you guys all have John's book!

bj

*YH is www.yayhooray.com

That was great, Mark!

Joachim Müller-Lanc

Joachim is especially talented in combining positive/negative forms - must be part of his Japanese leanings.

hhp

John's the main reason I stayed at Drexel, and am fascinated by type.

Eric P., e-mail John for a copy of his book.

I'd like to get an ambigram tattoo I decided.

The eps file above...if anyone would like
to mess with this...a few combinations are
problematic. Collaboration appreciated.

Hey, that's not bad! The o/a works better in the first one, I think. I don't know what you can do with the p/p. I like the t/y in the second one better.

The cerulean "typography" ambigram is good, but it looks like Greek to me. Probably because of the t/y and the p/p forms. The funny thing about yours was that I immediately read it as "typography" but I had difficulty picking out individual letters.

Tim, truly beautiful swashbuckling, mate.
Get a frame around it immediately!

here's where I was going with mine...
still a work in progress....

Mark, "pretty absorbing" eh?

I think Tim and I are experiencing what you did
20-some years ago.

the Typophile ambigram was really bothering.

typo p hile
t=e
y=l
p=i
o=h
and flip the p.

blackletter and conventional, struck out.

I sketched out some cursive letters and
thought of suburban from emigre, with the
lowercase l and y being the same glyph flipped.

That made me decide that a script skeleton would work,
but I'd have to fudge a bit on the problematic h/o
combination...

the bottom one is a half-finished take on
word balloon, forum banter, etc.





Tim (or Mark), do either of you want to take this and do
some of your cool blackletter...while maintaining a script
skeleton...i don't know if it'd work.

Tim, I like your 'typography' as a late entry for the Tee contest
or an early favorite in the Typophile Tattoo contest.

bj

ps, this is not experimental!

:P

Here's an alternate strategy:



I intentionally put in breaks in the y/l in hopes that it would
make the o/h trick less obvious. (My theory is that it helps
to give the unambiguous characters a bit of ambiguity to
make the unavoidably ambiguous ones blend in better.)

Kenn asked:

does the Langdon book have tips and tricks?

He has a chapter explaining the development of one of his
ambigrams,

How about this:

And the winner of the typophile T contest is...

Mark, this is great stuff!

hhp

Thanks!

I had the basic idea for the last two last week, but it was
coming out all ugly. I couldn't get the o-p-h to work.
Forgetting about it for a while helped.

Far prefer the non loopy version, italicising it seems to add to the legibility.
The only way I could get past all the loops in the middle was this - still not a genuine solution as I cheated the e.

Golden!

Martin,

That's pretty good! I haven't seen many ambigrams done
with an existing typeface (Poetica).

You might want to pick up Dan Drown's book Angels and Demon's.

That has Langdon ambigrams in it as well.

And I, too, like Martin's ambigram t-shirt using Poetica. I like the controlled "misuse" of glyphs to represent other glyphs.
I've attached my own thoughtype 2002 logo, created using one of my friend Cyrus Highsmith (of Font Bureau fame) experimental typefaces (and the CIA compendium of Jens Gehlhaar for the subhead) because it's quite the opposite of an ambigram: it may not be really "read", not even in a mirror.

tht_logo2002 thoughtype.logo_02.pdf (22.0 k)