Fractals, ambigrams & more

by | Sunday, July 29, 2018

Photo & and design © Punya Mishra.
The photo of bubbles was taken with cell phone camera (equipped with a macro lens). 

Fractals are mathematical/geometrical structures that exhibit self-similarity at increasingly small (or large) scales. Fractals were popularized by Benoit B. Mandelbrot in his 1982 book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” Recently, Ambigram.com magazine set up a competition to design fractal ambigrams, i.e. design and write words related to fractals in such a way that it could be read in more than one way.  I was inspired to create a bunch of designs that, in one way or another, attempt to capture fractals typographically.

Here for instance is a typographic fractal design for the word “Fractal.” You can see an animated version of this and many more designs here

Enjoy.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Inside-Out: Happy 2015

Every winter break (for the past six years) our family creates a video to welcome the new year. This is no ordinary video. It requires days of discussion, planning, construction, shooting, and editing. Our videos never feature us (expect maybe a still-shot of the...

Mind power: Brain Machine Interfaces

Imagine controlling machines, typing text or juggling balls using nothing but the power of thought. What sounds like far-fetched science fiction is gradually becoming possible, providing hope for disabled patients -- and new gimmicks for the computer gaming industry....

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

This is the third of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. This is the second of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The...

Design at Apple (a his-story)

Fast Company has compiled an oral-history of design at Apple. It did so through interviews with many of the key players in Apple's history. It is a his-story because, though there are some women who show up... the main narrative is about guys, Steve Jobs, Jonathan...

Natural v.s. Artificial Intelligence in Teaching

The field of educational technology is littered by attempts to replace the teacher by creating some kind of a technological learning system that would make the teacher redundant. All such attempts have failed. This has, however, not prevented people from trying. This...

New ambigrams for AERA

I was invited to give two talks at the the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. One was a Ignite presentation (5 minutes, 20 slides set to move at 15 seconds per slide), and the other was an ED Talk (sort of like a TED talk...

Quoted in the State News

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Simon Shuster, journalist at the State News. A couple of quotes made it into the article. Here, for the record, is the link: Wired up, ready to go. Interestingly enough, this was the second story that Simon has written about...

Education by Design, new fall course

Education by Design, new fall course

I am excited about my new fall course, titled Education by Design. This is a heavily reimagined version of a class that I taught a couple of times at MSU and once here (last fall at ASU). The MSU version that I co-taught with Danah Henriksen received First...

TPACK Newsletter #26, February 2016

TPACK Newsletter #26, February 2016

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #26: February 2016 Welcome to the twenty-sixth edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you,...

1 Comment

  1. Alessandro

    Hi Punya.
    I really appreciate your ambigrams: they are well made indeed!
    Just for you to correct a wrong link: the monthly competition is not on ambigram.com (the site, alas, is dead after a crash), but on ambigr.am
    Do you know about other competitions around the world?
    Have a nice day
    Alessandro, an Italian in Germany

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Alessandro Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *