The Beauty of Letters

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories.
— Vera Nazarian

On tap: Calligraphy, ambigrams, fonts.

Are you familiar with ambigrams? They are words/designs that can be read from more than one direction. Such as the cover of Wordplay by John Langdon:


You can read the word "Wordplay" and the author's name rightside up or upside down.

An ambigram for The Princess Bride:


Here's one by Kevin Pease:

I'm sharing a number of works today by calligrapher, illustrator, and font designer Hal Taylor. Here is an ambigramesque font that Taylor created for the DaVinci Code movie.


WiseGeek, who has info about calligraphy and its history, offers this definition of calligraphy: The art of writing script in such a way as to express the beauty of what is being written in the formation of the letters themselves.

These are by Hal Taylor:




Another font by Taylor:

Abstract Calligraphy
by Khawar Bilal

Links:
* How to Draw Ambigrams
* Online calligraphy lessons
* Gorgeous calligraphy at BibliOdyssey
* Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed, called an ambigram poem (a.k.a. reverso)
* Favorite ambigrams, Ambigram Magazine
* Scott Kim's Inversion resources for teachers
* Sites for downloading free fonts: dafont, Abstract Fonts, and Fontspace

A decorative reflective letter "Y" -- not sure where I got it, but probably through How About Orange: