Word of the day: Ambigram

A lovely new client of mine is getting married later on this summer, and she asked me to have a look at doing her wedding invites. Now its going to be a very classy affair and she's a very classy lady so we are going the whole letterpress, lined envelopes and cream stock route. BUT, she really wanted me to look at creating a monogram based around her and her future-husband's initials (L & J), and the date of their nuptials (8th Sept 2008). So we can blind emboss it and do all the touchy feely stuff that graphic designers get so excited about.

Now, since the date was almost palindromic (8.11.8), we both really wanted the monogram to be as symmetrical as possible. I had a bit of a eureka moment when I realised that in some script fonts, if you invert the capital L you get something that looks a lot like a J. Cue two romantically entwined initials, bound together by the date of their wedding. Which looks exactly the same when you turn it upside down! Wow. That's, like, symbolism.

My client, however, pointed out that I had not in fact invented anything new. Such things are called ambigrams and you can find some absolutely stunning examples of them here. All of which make my efforts look a little shoddy. Rats.