Hortschlaki Blog

15 inspiring ambigram logos

An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, or flipscript, is a graphical figure that spells out one or more words not only as presented, but also in another direction or orientation (from Wikipedia).

Here follows 15 inspiring examples, with some further ambigram resources.

Aerosmith

John Langdon designed this logo for Aerosmith.

“Created to be a gift from Dan Brown to Stephen Tyler. I was able to retain the look of Aerosmith’s long-standing logo, while turning it into a rotational ambigram.”

John has written some great tips for those wanting to create their own ambigrams, and I’ve referenced his website in the resources below.

Wachovia

More info about Brian Risk’s take on the Wachovia logo.

Balance

A personal design from Agency26.

Edge

Edge logo, designed by Raja Sandhu.

Ann

Logo designer: Kevin Burr of Ocularink.

Delorean Motor Company

This one’s a mirror-image ambigram, for the car made famous in Back to the Future.

Update: 03 March 2009
The following two logos, for NIN and ABBA, have ambigram-like qualities.

Nine Inch Nails

For the band Nine Inch Nails.

ABBA

Logo for the iconic band, ABBA.

NEW MAN

Logo for the French clothes manufacturer, NEW MAN, designed in 1969 (source) byRaymond Loewy. This was one of your favourite logos, featured here previously.

Blacksmith

Blacksmith website. Thanks, Steve.

Society 27

The Society 27 ambigram is a personal project of Pavel Pavlov.

Truce Vodka

Not quite an ambigram, and I’m not sure what you’d call it, but I found it interesting nonetheless — for Truce Vodka, 
by Agency26, who also created the Balance ambigram shown previously
.

Update: 09 August 2009
If you know who’s responsible for the Truce design, do let me know.

Update: 22 November 2009
I’ve been told it’s by Turner Duckworth. Thanks, Owen.

Travel

For those travel-loving logo designers out there, how about this ambigram travel mug?

It’s available from Flipscript, and reads ‘travel’.

Labyrinth

I found this beautiful ‘labyrinth’ design in the ambigram Flickr pool.

Logo for Ambigram

You’ll notice this one isn’t quite like the others. It’s a logo for the Ambigram advertising agency, created by Pentagram (more info on Pentagram’s blog). I think they missed a trick by not actually allowing for logo rotation. Okay, so it may not have been as legible, but you only need to visit the Wikipedia page on ambigrams for an example of how effective it could’ve been.

Happy holidays

A fitting way to wrap-up this post, by wishing you all a very happy holiday period with this holidays ambigram from npgraphicdesign.

Have you created any ambigrams you’d like to share?

Hortschlaki@gmail.com