Ambigram – Heilig

heilig ambigram design

“Its perfect! I love how it turned out. Thanks so much for the amazing work! I’m so glad that I found you and that you were able to do this for me!” — Kate on heilig ambigram

I received this ambigram commission thru this website. Kate wanted the word “heilig” which is a German word for sacred. She also wanted it to be feminine.

When I work with ambigrams that are feminine, I usually go for cursive font styles. It is an approach that would click with women. Many times, the cursive look will get an instant nod and would not require any modifications.

For the heilig design, I used a common cursive font that I used for many of my designs already. The middle letters were a bit easy. Working with IE-LI was a bit quick. The H-G inversion was a bit harder. The design above was my first revision.

The first revision needed a lot of improvements. The dot for the letter I’s did look that nice. It didnt fit well with the overall design. It looked stiff. So I used a spiral dot instead which is similar to the curves in H and G.

The bigger problem was the H-G part. The H looked like a B. If I move the floating curve at the bottom, it will be too separated that the G will look like a Y.

The first solution was to add a “foot” for the letter H. This will add to the lower case H look and avoid mistaking it as a B. I also tried moving the vertical stroke of the letter H either higher or lower. But it had an effect on how the letter G looked like. So I decided to change the floating curve to a more cursive one. It was more appropriate and the B effect was greatly reduced.

The final design is shown below. I loved how the final design turned out. The letters were very much alive with the curves but still maintained a subtle feminine effect.