Ambigram – Killen

“Always Willing to work with you until desired effect is achieved. Ambigram came out great…” – customer feedback on Killen Ambigram Design

Here is a commissioned ambigram for Killen. He requested an ambigram of his family name which he will have tattooed on his back. Part of the request is to design it to look like the font used in the ambigram of Illuminati which was drawn by John Langdon for the Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons. With the approval from the requester, I am posting my design here.

It is very challenging to get a request that have a predefined letter style in mind, since not all names or words would work as an ambigram using a specific font. When moving from one style to another, some readability or form would suffer. Before I started working with the design, I advised that I could not guarantee an exact font style but I can definitely come close to it.

The name Killen is easy on the LL part. That’s a natural ambigram. The I-E inversion is commonly encountered and there are a lot of ways to do it in an ambigram. The K-N is the tough part. I did an ambigram for Kwan and used the same style here. My first draft was this.

His feedback was that the K-N wasn’t very readable and that the middle LL looks very static and boring. He wanted to see some form to the overall design. So I came up with a new solution for K-N and made a cave in and out approach to the design. Here are the next drafts.

The K-N was greatly improved. It’s readable. However, we didn’t like the cave in design. The LL was made smaller and looks more like letter II than LL. We decided to go for the cave out approach. Finally, I offered a new design that made it slant. We both liked it this time.

I still made a few edits on the form of the ambigram trying several arrangements like arc, diamond, pointed and others. Since this will go to his back, he wanted something that will look good on the contour of his back. I wont be posting the final design here but somehow the design still looks similar as above except on the arrangement.

I was great working with this customer. His feedback was very straightforward and clear making the design work for both of us.