Nikita Prokhorov’s Ambigram of the Month: Practice Makes Perfect
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Practice makes perfect. That's an adage that is applicable to any field. If you are a chef, you need to experiment with different dishes and cuisines. If you're a professional athlete, you have to put in hours in the gym to fine-tune your body, and make sacrifices along the way. If you're a designer/illustrator, you have to exercise your creative muscles and train them in order to become more creative, as well as to keep your creativity from stagnating. Especially as an artist, working in a very subjective field, you have to constantly improve your abilities to stay current. It could mean stepping out of your comfort zone, acquiring a completely new skill set, or simply moving to a new place to start from scratch. Regardless of your individual approach or what field you happen to work in, practice always makes perfect!
From the start, even after some brief sketch explorations, I could see that there would be some easy parts and some challenging parts in this ambigram.
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The toughest part would be having to mix lowercase/uppercase letters and to keep the styling consistent. Several combinations came together rather easily (p/ct, t/e, e/e), while other took quite a bit more time (ac/rf, ic/sp, mak/mak). Those can be seen on the last set of pencil sketches.
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In the last set, I also several different letters flips (v2), but quickly realized they wouldn't work and that the letter flips in the original version (v1) would be optimal and much easier to read/recognize.
In the digital stage, I spent quite a bit of time refining glyph terminations and serifs.
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For this ambigram, there would be a lot of repeating elements, so I could easily redraw them in Illustrator based on sketches that were somewhat rough. For some ambigrams, I prefer my sketches to be very precise, but for others, rough sketches will suffice.
And last, but not least, the finished ambigram!
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