Ambigrammia

• 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface.
• 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia.
• 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a more neutral term) form a context in which each of these four shapes is perceived. Even if each shape taken in isolation is a somewhat shaky member of its intended alphabetic category, it's a different ballgame when all four are placed side by side, since now, the shaky alphabetic suggestion made by each one, supplemented by the prior existence of the familiar name "DAVE" results in each questionable part reinforcing all the other questionable parts, and the overall upshot is, mirabile dictu, a strong member of the higher-level "DAVE" category.
• 21. After all, written words, no less than letters are visual categories, and they too can have members and non-members, and dubious in-between cases.
• 28. Over the next fifty years (from 1920), experimentation with far-out letterforms continued apace, passionately exploring heretofore unimagined regions of alphabetic space.
• 35. A successful ambigram is an artwork delicately balanced on the knife-edge between creation and discovery. It is, on the one hand, a highly personal artistic invention, and yet it is, at the same time, a find that anyone could have made.
• 35. Well, no - I take it back - not anyone! That's the most important point here. In order to be a high-quality ambigram-discoverer, you must be able to see, in your mind's eye, a myriad of ways to distort letters while maintaining their identities, and all sorts of novel ways of breaking letters into pieces (or combining letters or letter-pieces into new wholes).... But no only imagination counts; also a reliable intuitive sense for designs that will probably "play in Peoria"... versus those designs that veer so far off into wild territory that their readability is lost. And lastly, a strong sense of esthetics is crusial - the ability to imbue a calligraphic design with a unified, appealing style.
• 35. Only someone who possesses all these skills will be able to see the beautiful metaphorical shell lying on the metaphorical beach, partially covered by drifts of metaphorical sand. Yes, the exotic shell is objectively there, lying in plain sight for "anyone" to see - but, ironically, very few people have the vision needed to recognize it.
• 35. Creativity as seeing.
• 36. I would argue that artistic creativity in general is nothing but selection - and for me photography reveals this truth more clearly than any other activity does.
• 40. Picasso: "In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the bull's head came to me before I had a chance to think."
• 43. The seldom-noticed ambiguities lurking under nearly every stone in everyday language are similar to the potential ambiguities lurking in the letters making up each word and name we encounter - ambiguities that allow an ambigrammist to turn a word or phrase into an ambigram - but it takes a lot of practice to develop a sensitivity that allows one to "see" what is there (and always was there) but that goes unseen by nearly everyone.
• 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.
• 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.