Inversions (Ambigrams)

1. Introduction

This page was inspired by puzzle master Scott Kim, who also has an intriguing collection of word inversions that look the same when flipped. The icon Kim below reads the same either way around (the icon is from Scott Kim's web page: click on it to go to his home). These inversions show how resilient and resourceful our visual system is.

2. My own work

Here's one example I came up with using my daughter's name Dana Choe, written in lower case. Does it look convincing? :-)

3. Image Rotation Code

I created the original image above with xfig and then used gimp to make a 180-degree rotated animation (gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Package).

For the animation, I wrote a gimp script-fu script (for gimp version >=1.1), which is available here: rotate-anim.scm. Put it in your home ~/gimp-1.x/scripts/ and start up gimp. Click on Xtns->Script-Fu->Misc, and you will see Rotate Animation - Simple.

Last Updated : Sunday, 09-Dec-2001 02:29:11 CST