I dedicate mornings to calligraphy when the whole house is asleep. In fact, in order to master the basics of calligraphy, regularity and consistency are necessary. There is a Latin sentence вЂњNulla dies sine lineaвЂќ which means no day without a drawn line. Today I teach classes at this branch but the road to it was long and difficult. Fortunately, a branch of the Krakow School of Calligraphy operated in my city and I came under the wings of the outstanding calligrapher Aleksandra Д†wikowska vel Nibme, who led me into the world of written letters. I also knew that a better understanding of the structure of letters would improve the construction of my ambigrams. I didnвЂ™t have time but I was hungry for creation. A picture says more than a thousand words. I must admit that this coincided with the moment when my first son Eric appeared in the world. I became seriously interested in calligraphy when I ran out of time to realize ambigrams. Earlier in high school I designed logos for some bands. This was my first serious contact with the letters. At that time ЕЃГіdЕє was a multicultural city where Polish, German, Jewish and Russian cultures were mixed. I analyzed nineteenth-century inscriptions from ЕЃГіdЕє cemeteries. It is a science dealing with inscriptions carved in stone. I studied history, but I specialized in the auxiliary field of this science: epigraphy. Calligraphy is a kind of culmination of my interests. I became interested in calligraphy very late, although all my life revolved around letters. 1) At what stage in your life did you get interested in calligraphy? Did you get a formal education in the area? His work can be found on his Polish language blog called Signum & Imago and his instagram. Our first interview will be with Daniel Dostal, best known in the ambigram world for working on the Flipscript Fyrewater and WyndStorm fonts. Part of this has been addressed by some of our posts and tutorials, but we also want to branch out to known ambigram artists to talk about their experiences in the field, their personal lives and the process of making ambigrams. ItвЂ™s definitely a good idea to keep a couple of different versions just for options.As you may have noticed, here at MakeAmbigrams we are interested in the art of making ambigrams, generating ambigrams and their history. From here I already have an upside вЂњhвЂќ, which is the goal, I then needed to make it look like a вЂњjвЂќ without compromising the integrity of the вЂњhвЂќ shape too much. First I looked at the вЂњjвЂќ and вЂњhвЂќ and decided it would be easier to start with the latter. Type out your word, convert the text to outlines and start reshaping! Because Illustrator is a vector editing application, it gives you more freedom than Photoshop for playing with your letter forms.

To do this, itвЂ™s best to open up Adobe Illustrator.

Step 3: Create Your Letter PairsДЇrom here itвЂ™s time to actually start forming your ambigram. For instance, if the вЂњOвЂќ and вЂњSвЂќ have particularly similar shapes in a given font, it might be a perfect candidate for our вЂњJoshвЂќ ambigram. ThereвЂ™s no reason you canвЂ™t pick any font that you want, but one trick is to look for similarities in the letter pairings that you require. A quick browse through my fonts folder revealed a number of solid potential starting points. With this in mind, old english or cursive letters make for prime candidates.

When youвЂ™re working with the kind of duality that ambigrams involve, having room to turn leftover pieces into flourishes and swooshes makes your job much easier. Ornate fonts tend to have lots of superfluous detail that isnвЂ™t true to the way you would actually write the letter, while still having easily identifiable letters. Since ambigrams letters have to serve multiple purposes, itвЂ™s often the case that more ornate letter forms work the best. The big shortcut is that we can just modify existing fonts and save ourselves a lot of trouble. Step 2: Choose a FontДЄs I said above, creating an ambigram from scratch can take a lot of work. The really nice part about designing your letter pairings is that you only need to create around half as many of them as there are letters because you just reuse them for the other half of the word.

Flipscript ambigram generator