You can find the logo here, along with the excellent soundtrack: https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_log...
TIL or rather today I saw the letters there for the first time. Just thought it was S's all these years! Nice one
Back in 2008-ish the site could generate ambigrams for you too. It was powered by an algo that pieced together a large set of hand drawn glyphs. PHP at it's best :D
https://web.archive.org/web/20080730222127/http://www.wowtat...
AD -> render an A that looks like a D when viewed upside down
DA -> render the same character in the other orientation
Then to use the font you need to carefully construct palindromes out of the supported pairs. Of course copy-pasting this would be a pita, accessibility would be non-existent, but could be fun for print and such.
Would definitely be limiting on which words you could make a readable ambigram though, because many ambigrams rely on letters that aren't one-to-one mappings (one letter becomes two, or letters between letters, etc.)
[1] https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...
The winner of this: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings
And every single submission for this is amazing: https://ambigr.am/contest/duality
Also nice tip: You can click on the image and it will flip it for you. Especially useful if viewing on a computer, and also because some of them mirror instead of flip.
A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.
Same idea here. A text needs to be diffused from two views until it looks the same but still matches the input. It might already exist.
Edit: https://diffusionillusions.com/
Edit: Ambigram using Diffusion models https://raymond-yeh.com/AmbiGen/
They're also like the made-up language from the movie Arrival. You kind of need to know the end and the beginning at the same time.
I wonder how good GenAI is in generating ambigrams. I know they're very good in generating those visual illusions of having a face in a landscape. Perhaps that can be the next "Pelican test" once the Pelican test has been completely absorbed in training.
https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/18/scott-kim-gard...
Quite the coincidence.
If someone actually pulled it off, you could test the Sapir Whorf hypothesis rather easily.
Edit: well, on reload, it's blank again.
Most of the images on the site are interactable, and doing so will help visualize the various ways you get multiple meanings from a single "gram".
This is done by creating letter forms that can be interpreted as other letter forms under symmetry, similar to the u and n being interpreted as each other's inverted forms. These ambigrammists are making designs in which more pairs of letters have that kind of relationship.
I have asked a few left handed and right handed friends of mine to make ambigrams, or do mirror writing, and it's quite interesting how easy it is for left handed people compared to right handed people.
I'm also left-handed and learned belatedly that I can do mirror-writing with my non-dominant right hand. I'm not that coordinated with that hand, so the writing is a bit messy, but it doesn't seem to require noticeable extra cognitive effort to do the mirroring.
I could also pretty easily read upside down or backwards from around the time I learned to read.
However, I've never found it easy to make ambigrams!
Being able to tap to rotate is sweet!
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