One of the things I discovered while participating in the World’s First Internet Balloon Race last month was the existence of ambigrams. By definition these are “graphical figures that spell out a word not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation”. So what does that mean? Well it kinda works like this:

I find things like this interesting because they play with perception the way an M.C. Escher drawing can. Except the point of view doesn’t change the perceived image but rather keeps it the same. There doesn’t seem to be any particular use for ambigrams, but there are communities devoted to developing them. However recently the art has crept into the commercial world as well.

[ Image from Orthocomics ]

There is nice tutorial to creating your own at Ambigram.net. So if you have some free time sketch one up and share it with The High Contrast community.