Name: Ambigram Art
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T04:30:59.000Z
Duration: 10 min 46 s
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Hello! And welcome to a very special episode of "Michael's Toys"

Future continuous

Today, we're going to be talking about ambigrams.

An ambigram is something that retains meaning or has new meanings in different orientations.

I have a number of books made by ambigram artists. I'm a big fan of them.

One of the most famous popularizers of the ambigram is John Langdon.

And as you can see, it says "Wordplay" right there on the book.

But if I reorient the book, the title says, well, it still says "Wordplay". Tada!

An ambigram. Now John Langdon is incredibly famous. Oh my gosh...

I just realized that even his name on the book is an ambigram. Look at that.

So it's "Wordplay by John Langdon" and if I turn it upside down the book becomes,

"Wordplay by John Langdon". Not too shabby.

Now some of my favorites in this book include his drawing of the word, "Philosophy".

As you can see it clearly says "Philosophy" but upside down, oh, well it still says "Philosophy".

OOH! What about science!? Clearly science cannot be flipped upside down and still say-- Science!?

Upside down, is "Philosophy, Art and Science".

One of my favorites is the word "minimum", drawn, pretty much as minimally as you can get it.

It's just a squiggle, but you can see that this is the word "minimum".

You can even become more minimal than this though.

If you don't mind not dotting your eyes, in which case this is literally just a squiggle that says "minimum."

Upside down, "Momentum Equals Mass times Velocity."

Which it does. I first found out about Langdon through what he calls, an "Oscillation Ambigram."

A drawing that doesn't need to be turned at all for it to look like it means something else.

It's this one right here. As you can see, he's written the word:

Or has he written the word, "Learn"? There's ambiguity here.

Another great piece of art that Langdon made that I find incredibly clever is his realization that the logo for the company 3M,

From the other side through the looking-glass looks like a self-portrait of him painting the word "ME".

Another incredibly influential populizer of the ambigram is Scott Kim.

Scott Kim is, like Langdon, just an absolute genius.

And, a lot of Scott Kim's work is shared online often without attribution.

So let's fix that today. The one I see A LOT that is just wonderful, is his:

Mirror Symmetry Depiction of the Alphabet. Where is that? Oh, wow, the very next page. Here we go...

So, Kim here has written out every letter of the alphabet in order.

ABCDEFGHIJ and so on all the way down to XYZ.

But there is a vertical axis down this way. Along which there is mirror symmetry.

So, ABCDE and F, in a mirror, look like ABCDEF.

Another one of Scott Kim's pieces of work that I love,

Might also be described as an oscillation ambigram because it's just sort of two things at once.

Except parts of the word "False" have been colored red to spell "True". If you look close enough at a lie,

The first one, I actually shared this on Twitter.

The first one I ever found that made me buy this book is upside down, which upside down, is still upside down.

So Scott Kim, and, there it is, John Langdon.

Fantastic artists. I am constantly impressed by the work that they do.

Let's go back in time and look at some of the earliest known examples of non-natural ambigrams.

Peter Newell published "Topsys and Turvys" back in 1893 and it was a smash sensation.

So popular in fact that, I mean, it's still being published. Now this book contains all kinds of images that, when upside down,

Look like other things. It famously ends with the word:

That's a strange way to end a book until you realize that when inverted, the word "Puzzle" becomes "The End"

And this book was so popular Peter Newell wrote a follow-up creatively titled "Topsys and Turvys #2"

I mean couldn't you have thought of something better?

Like imagine if I'd been like 'Hey, my channel is called Vsauce and this other one's called Vsauce 2'

"Topsys and Turvys #2" has yet again a huge amount of awesome images that when upside down, look like something else.

In shady groves Adolphus swings when Summer's zephyrs blow.

And slides head foremost down the hill when winter brings the snow.

So upside down, we have a person on their belly, on a sled, supposedly going down a hill.

But right-side up, it's a person wearing a nice little summer hat in a swing.

Sure, you can draw an image, or a word, perhaps a sentence or arrangement of letters that is an ambigram.

Yes, you can. And that brings us to the upside-down world of Gustave Verbeek.

Verbeek drew comics for various newspapers, quite a while ago - more than a hundred years ago.

One of his most fantastic strips involved two characters:

Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo.

What you'll see is that these are her eyes, obviously, and that is her mouth,

And these are two little nose holes. Now she's wearing this big dress and she has on a hat.

This is the hat, this white thing here is the hat band,

And then there's these blue ribbons coming off of the hat.

And she's got little tufts of hair coming out from underneath the hat.

But of course, as you could probably already tell, Little Lady Lovekins upside down is Old Man Muffaroo.

The hat band becomes his teeth in his mouth,

And the little pieces of hair that come out from her hat are his... Mustachio, mustache, hairs.

Her nose and mouth are just kind of wrinkles or imperfections on his forehead and her dress is,

So, once you've got two characters that went upside down become the other you could start having them go on adventures.

It is now storytime. This comic was published on July 31st of 1904 in the New York Herald.

In the canoe an enormous fish that Lovekins and Muffaroo have caught.

Lovekins takes the fish on shore while Muffaroo pushes off in the canoe to see if he can catch another.

Unluckily, he hooks a swordfish and there is trouble right away.

The old man fights bravely, the swordfish dives, then he comes up again.

And this time he thrusts his sharp snout right through the bottom of the canoe.