Ambigram – Anthony

Anthony Ambigram

“Excellent communication, excellent artistic vision, in the end it was even better than I expected and indeed a perfect reflection of what I wanted.” – Customer feedback on Anthony ambigram

I was commissioned to design an ambigram for a tattoo. The requirements was to have an ambigram for the name Anthony and incorporated with the design is something related to music and a scroll.

I used an English Font which was a bit modern. Letters were tall and slim which are appropriate for masculine designs. My first design was had wider letters and we opted for this instead. The hard part was designing the letter T-O inversion. Both letters are very different in structure. My solution was to combine them having a letter T and a circular pattern at the bottom for the letter O.

The design might cause some trouble when reading them since the T doesn’t look like a T and the letter O can be mistaken as a letter Q. I used two trick in designing ambigrams here.

First is to guide the reader to the more common letters in AN and NY and allow them to fill in the blanks. Very few names can start with AN and end with NY. Thus in the design, I made sure that the AN and NY easily stands out. This narrows down the readers options on the names.

Second, design the top of the letters well. The top part of the letter defines most of the letter itself. This is John Langdon’s tip as well. Here, the bar for the T is very prominent. Also the circular part is place a bit lower to put more emphasis on the letter T. When inverted, the letter O becomes more prominent since the bar is now below.

I would agree that the O is very close to being a Q. But again the trick is to let the reader fill in the blanks once you have established the other letters. I would always get people to say the name ANTHONY rather than ANTHQNY when I show them the design.

There are other solutions for Anthony that avoids the T-O problem. But I find this solution better in form and readability.

The next part was adding the music and scroll. The client sent in samples of a music sheet and converted that to a scroll type instead of a flat piece of paper. We also decided that the scroll will open vertically rather than horizontally.

My idea was to let the musical notes fly randomly from one side and when it reaches the paper, the musical notes will stick into the scroll. It’s like beautiful music is being created from the air. The shadows and skews on the music notes on the right side are to give an impression that it is still flying. I have to create and render each note one by one to achieve the desired effect.

Final Design - Anthony Ambigram on Scroll

When the final design was complete, the client was happy with the design. I was also happy that the design meets our expectations. We had a great communication as we progress with the design especially when I am stuck at different options. I have to send emails and ask which direction to take. It really saved us a lot of time and unnecessary revisions.

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