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...
4 new ambigrams (STEM, STEAM, Research & Gandhi)
Here are four new ambigrams I have created over the past few days. All related in some ways to things I have been thinking about. The first two are for STEM (an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) and STEAM (Science, Technology,...
Sternberg: New ambigram
A new ambigram for Robert Sternberg, psychologist.
New ambigram book, with 3 of my designs
Ambigrams Revealed: A Graphic Designer's Guide To Creating Typographic Art Using Optical Illusions, Symmetry, and Visual Perception is a new book edited by Nikita Prokhorov. The book showcases the works of ambigram artists from around the world. It includes...
Happy Valentine’s Day (new ambigram)
A quick and dirty ambigram for Valentine's day, scribbled on the back of an envelope (literally), and photographed using my phone! Have a great day everybody 🙂
Dancing with words, Good/Evil in a new ambigram context
Many years ago I constructed an ambigram for the words "good" and "evil." The idea came to me while waiting for a traffic light to turn green. The memory of it is so vivid in my mind that even today when I come to that particular intersection I remember that moment...
New ambigrams, Mert-Demir and one more…
I recently received an email with the following request: I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my...
New ambigram: Nirvaan
My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here ) and his wife Pam, recently had their second child, a baby boy. Since I had created an ambigram for the first guy (click here to see the ambigram for Nihal), I felt it was required of me...
Good Evil Ambigram
Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of...
Ambigrams on the web
Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider...
Christine Greenhow visit + new ambigram
Christine Greenhow from the University of Maryland visited the College of Education this past week. She gave a talk and met with various faculty members and graduate students. I had met Christine a couple of years ago when we had both been invited to the National...
New triplet Ambigram (Now in 3D)!
A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here's a triplet ambigram that casts three...
Creativity ambigram
Here's a new ambigram I designed at the kick-off for the MSU Creativity Initiative. I will have more information on that in a later post but for now... enjoy. Creativity, any which way you look at it.
ABC-Triplet Ambigram
I am currently teaching a course on Creativity in Teaching & Learning and as a part of that I was searching for an interesting image to highlight a note I was posting to the class. I wanted an image that represented, in some cool manner, the multi-dimensionality...
New ambigram logo for ideaplay.org
I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original...
Creating Palindrograms, aka palindromic ambigrams
Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged...
Jere Brophy / Motivation Ambigram
A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, "motivation" one direction and "Jere Brophy" when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr....
New ambigrams for a new blog!
What do you think this is? Take a guess...Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure...
New ambigram: Nihal
My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here) and his wife Pam, recently had a baby boy. This ambigram is of his name: Nihal Enjoy.
Fact / Fiction, ambigram
Yesterday after I had posted my two latest ambigrams (see them here) I got a message on Facebook from my cousin Sonny (the one who composed the cool music for my Explore, Create videos) saying Big deal. I can make "fact" and "fiction" blur together till they are...
Computer Fiction: Two new ambigrams
For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while - till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later... here they are. Enjoy Computer Fiction
TPACK Ambigram
I have been wanting to create a TPACK ambigram for a while now... what would be better than combining my two greatest loves - technology integration in teaching WITH ambigrams! Finally after some subtle prodding by Matt Koehler I have finally done so. This is a...
Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined
This is an extended piece on the manner in which the web, small pieces loosely joined, can lead to “serendipitous connectabilty” (something I had written about earlier here). All this is situated in a story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya...
Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of...
Ambigrams and the creative process
I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is "devoted to the art...
Chinese-English Ambigrams
During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...
Amusings & other creations (from the early web)
I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...
It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration
I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...
Flip/Flop: Goodbye 2022 – Welcome 2023
Since 2008 our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. Our videos are always typographical in nature with some kind of an AHA! moment or optical illusion built in. This year’s video is no different. Check it...
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Punya Mishra is Associate Dean of Scholarship & Innovation and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (with an affiliate appointment in the Design School). As associate dean, he leads a range of initiatives that provides a...