Amelie

A particularly pleasing example of the art of the ambigram, which turned out much better and much smarter than it started out. The trick was to forget all my preconceptions about how the letter ‘a’ can only ever look like the letter ‘e’ when turned upsidedown.

The central unit of this design forms a very nice, if fairly obvious, solution for ‘Mel’. Not that I started in the middle; if I had I might have got here sooner. It seemed much more obvious to start at the ends, and make the familar ‘a’/‘e’ match (see Hartney for a clear example). However, this method meant the middle ‘e’ couldn’t match the final one typographically.

The final solution only became clear when I stopped looking, stopped thinking, and started scribbling – an object lesson in never making the assumption that you know the answer before you’ve properly understood the question.