Kevin Pease / Ambigrams

This was something of a turning point that expanded my bag of tricks. At first, it seemed I easily had a straightforward solution:

The problem with this was that no matter how much I massaged the curves, nothing would completely eliminate the possibility that it might read "Rosert" and/or "Hangen" to someone who didn't know what it was supposed to be. The context is too ambiguous to rely on. In some situations, careful design can strengthen the correct reading, but in situations such as this, the preferable strategy is to find another solution that avoids this B/S entirely.

However one might choose to shift and squeeze the letters left and right, it used to be that the one thing you usually could never avoid in a finite ambigram was that the first letter would have to meet the last letter. The first inkling of the new technique that would defy this limitation was in a subtle detail of what I did for the Catalanos: By borrowing up and down among stacked lines, it is possible to put the perceived beginning and end in different places, and generally change the order in which strokes have to be paired. This idea soon proved indispensible for numerous subsequent commissions such as this.