First I looked at the “j” and “h” and decided it would be easier to start with the latter.

Type out your word, convert the text to outlines and start reshaping! Because Illustrator is a vector editing application, it gives you more freedom than Photoshop for playing with your letter forms. To do this, it’s best to open up Adobe Illustrator. Step 3: Create Your Letter Pairsįrom here it’s time to actually start forming your ambigram. For instance, if the “O” and “S” have particularly similar shapes in a given font, it might be a perfect candidate for our “Josh” ambigram. There’s no reason you can’t pick any font that you want, but one trick is to look for similarities in the letter pairings that you require. A quick browse through my fonts folder revealed a number of solid potential starting points. With this in mind, old english or cursive letters make for prime candidates. When you’re working with the kind of duality that ambigrams involve, having room to turn leftover pieces into flourishes and swooshes makes your job much easier. Ornate fonts tend to have lots of superfluous detail that isn’t true to the way you would actually write the letter, while still having easily identifiable letters.

Since ambigrams letters have to serve multiple purposes, it’s often the case that more ornate letter forms work the best. The big shortcut is that we can just modify existing fonts and save ourselves a lot of trouble. Step 2: Choose a FontĪs I said above, creating an ambigram from scratch can take a lot of work. The really nice part about designing your letter pairings is that you only need to create around half as many of them as there are letters because you just reuse them for the other half of the word.

Ambigram generator for two names