Perplex City

Now, if you’ve never heard of Perplex City then this is probably not the best place to begin your education, but since I had already heard of it, I tried my hand at an ambigram. Gratifyingly, someone liked it (scroll down to April 12th), although that caused no end of trouble, which I started to feel almost guilty about after a while.

Anyway, it’s a fun ambigram. And it’s even got capital letters in the right place, which is always a bonus. The p/e glyph was a sticking point for a while, and the solution helped to suggest the overall typographic style that I eventually adopted for the whole design. (It had started out much more angular and gothic.)

The design pretty much stands or falls on the success (or otherwise) of the innovative er/x ligature, and I think that this could probably be improved (the e is the weakest character of the whole design). But fortunately context and letterspacing comes to our rescue once again, and the mind is forced to make sense of the little swirly bit and (hopefully, although this may be rather subjective) comes to the conclusion that it is indeed an ‘e’.