My Life in Ambigrammia

Now I still make them occasionally, though I haven't updated the blog for a while.

I find that tangible art could sometimes say "thank you" more than the utterance of the words themselves.

Also makes for a great wedding gift:

https://cards.azriel.im/2018/09/kevin-fiona.html

Ambigr.am - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45478780 - Oct 2025 (40 comments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

I too love the art of creating an ambigram and my favourite one I've created is one that reads PUSH from one side of a glass door and PULL from the other. Here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/DH6W36voMe-/

Another textual constraint challenge I found similarly satisfying with Hofstadter's "repeated savoring of unanticipated small pieces of visual magic", was one I set myself as a teen to create the word CTRL (my graffiti tag) out of two components for each letter, but the same two components for every letter. I managed to dig out an image of it: https://gist.github.com/OisinMoran/0ca8dbdfea83d2250e723a034...

With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)

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In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last millennium, at https://wayback.archive-it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf

I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.

Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:

    font : benzene right
    creator : doug
    create date : Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991
    last edit : feb 24 94
    a 058002400B0000
    b 04824B00090000
    c 04800100090000

That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.