The Make Ambigrams Online Ambigram Generator is our attempt to make the most complete and accessible collection of ambigram fonts on the internet. Because of this, we have managed to collect some very different ambigram alphabets from all corners of the internet. Each of these has its own story and we will try to do those stories justice in this article. For general credits and usage rights, please click here.

The Ambimatic Ambigram font

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The very first ambigram generator dates back to 1996. It was started by David Holst, who handmade 676 single letter ambigrams with help of his friends and family. He used an auto-curve tool called FutureSplash Animator to create the letters and the website was javascript.
This ambigram maker or ‘Ambigramatic’ used the very same principle as all our generator. However, it is credited by many ambigram artists (including myself) as the tool that helped them get into ambigrams back in the day.

Today the generator and website that hosted it are gone, with only a partially functional echo on the internet archive. David focussed on other parts of his online business. For a while the font was only available on predatory android apps, but now it is hosted on our website with permission.

The AmbimaticHD Ambigram font

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This is a HD remake of the original ambimatic font, done for MakeAmbigrams.com. Each letter was created with the intent to be both smoother and as close as possible to the original. This is the default font in our generator as a nod to the original ambimatic.

The Ambiferret Ambigram font

ambigram

This is a font made for this website by the Ambigram Ferret. Read an interview with him here.

The Ductus Ambigram font

The Ductus Ambigram Font was created as a university project in 2013 by Daniel Seiler at the University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe.
At that time, Daniel began to write from right to left in his sketch book, because he would have less dirty hands as a left-handed writer using ink.
He gradually began to explore limits of glyph visibility, but moreover was simply curious about the direction of readability in language.

To this day the space of information storage and delivery is his focused topic – now in the field of head-worn Extended Reality technologies at https://aucta.io.

The DSMONO Ambigram font

DSMONO (Daniel Seiler Mono), is a vectorized monospace font, made by Peter F. Ennis, and based on the Ductus ambigram typeface.

The NSambi Ambigram font /Users/alex/Downloads/ambinit-t1.png

This font is created by Nick Streine as part of a senior college thesis.

The Ambinit Ambigram font

This is a font that was developed by Manoj Mhapankar specifically for MakeAmbigrams.

The DKSambi font

This font was made in 2016 by Dhaval Kiran Shah for his blog. It was made as a quick lookup tool for people wanting to make ambigrams. Dhaval is active on Instagram under the handle @the_ambigram_showcase

The l’Ambigram font

This is a font dates back to the 24th of August, 2004. It was hand made by Jean-Paul Davalan, and has been hosted on his website ever since. We host his font on our website with permission of his family.

The Ambidream Ambigram font

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Unlike the other Ambigram fonts in our collection, the Ambidream font is not made by a human, but is entirely computer generated. This is also the reason why not all letters are equally good, making this our most artistic font. Don’t let this dissuade you though, as the font has been able to make some very pretty ambigrams.

If you are wondering how a computer can make ambigram fonts, then we need to talk about neural networks and machine learning. This rapidly growing field uses complex algorithms to teach a computer how to do certain tasks. Usually by giving it thousands of examples of input and desired output. For example, this is what Google does when it tries to auto complete a search query based on the first few letters that you type, or how auto correct knows that you are using the wrong ‘then’ in a specific sentence.

In this case a Stanford grad student going by the alias of Hardmath123 fed his network a collection of hundreds of thousands of handwritten letters to teach it acceptable ways of writing a letter. He then did the same for the inverse collection and then combined the outcome of both to create a AI that tries to write letters that match both the rightside-up and upside-down database as closely as possible.

Once this is done he let the AI ‘dream’ up the best matches for each letter and the rest is history. For a more detailed explanation and the source code, please visit Hardmath123’s blog.

The Lake Reflection Ambigram font

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This is an odd font when compared to the rest, as it does not flip letters in a 180-degree fashion, but rather mirrors them straight through the middle. (Does the name make sense now?)

This font was created in 2009 by Daan Juttmann as an actual computer font. Which means that, unlike with our other fonts, you could just download it and use it in MS Word and any other writing application. (Like I am doing here!) Of course, this is only possible because for this font it is not necessary to map each letter to each other letter, like one has to do for a flip script.

Currently we only support lower case letters in our Ambigram Generator, therefore we suggest downloading the font for anyone who wants to play with it properly.