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Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 03:06 pm
I made this on the fifth. I scanned it today.

Bit of a long delay, I'm thinking. Well, no matter.

A straight scan of an ambigram of RZ

As is clear from the scan, the design went through a lot of work before it reached this stage. This was the twentieth letter or letter-pair I made in the course of cleaning up the design.

The greatest difficulty I faced in making this work was forming a legible R that didn't turn into a 2 when reversed. This problem resulted in the very square design you see – if there was any curve to the R, it killed the Z. It further resulted in the very short riser below the loop of the R, and the very large loop; this kept the design semi-symmetric like the Z, and unlike the 2. Eliminating the riser altogether did not produce a satisfactory result, however.

A less major failing was associated with the leg of the R; leaving it attached to the almost-loop part made the Z look like an 8. Even when it didn't, it looked far to strange, glued to the diagonal there for no reason. Having it float in space was much better, and allowed it to serve a double purpose as leg and as horizontal.

Now that I re-examine the design, I have to wonder if the addition of a short vertical to the floating leg there would help the Z without too much damage to the R. Not having checked, I can only conjecture that it might, but it might also make the whole look more like PuZ instead. I'm not going to bother.

A cleaner version of the scan, made in Photoshop

Having scanned and prepared the original, I noticed all the junk still visible on the page. By careful application of the "Polygonal Lasso" and "Paintbucket" tools in Photoshop, I have corrected that problem.

Incidentally, this latter version shrinks well into an avatar:

A smaller version of the cleaner version, suitable for use as a LJ user icon or forum avatar picture.

Being too stingy to pay for Livejournal, this icon will probably not join my lineup any time soon. I might use it somewhere else, though; maybe IIDB.

Oh, and much credit to [livejournal.com profile] kevinpease for the inspiration of his ambigram page, and to my parents for encouraging me and leading me to Scott Kim's ambigrams as well.
(Anonymous)
Thursday, January 12th, 2006 04:09 am (UTC)
that's definitely a great start in ambigram designing! keep up the great work!

visit our blog at http://nagfa.blogspot.com/
for our own ambigram designs..
Thursday, January 12th, 2006 02:46 pm (UTC)
Oh, thank you for your compliment. Your ambigrams look interesting as well – I'll check them out.