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Computer Graphics (180 degree rotation, 1988)




Title lettering for a 10-videodisk anthology of computer animation, published in Japan.


I met the folks behind this wonderful anthology at the annual Siggraph conference. The design appeared on the box spine and disk label: naturals since these are things that normally turn upside down. Other natural applications for inversions include backs of playing cards (check out Set and click on Triology to see the wonderful inversion John Landon did for the card game Triology), tires (Discover magazine reported several years ago that someone at a major tire company had patented a lowercase alphabet in which all letters turn upside down to become letters), and satellites (I did a logo for Ford Aerospace for GOES, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite).


The most interesting treatment of the design they came up with was a title animation on the videodisk. Instead of rotating the words so that "computer" becomes "graphics", which would have been the obvious choice, they let the words be stationary and instead suggested the symmetry by adding animated silhouettes of plant forms in rotational symmetry to the background. A wonderful, subtle and economical solution.


Most of this inversion works rather naturally; however, I resorted to a desperate trick to make the two central P's turn upside down.

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