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SYMMETRY. Rotation by 180 degrees. Turn this design upside down and you will see that it reads the same both ways. INSPIRATION. For Ultima, fantasy role-playing computer game series. STORY. In the late 90s my wife Amy Jo Kim was obsessed with Ultima Online, an online fantasy role-playing game developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts. Ultima is an elaborate graphical online world where thousands of players meet, go on adventures together and live out alternative lives in a mythical land of sword and sorcery. Ultima Online is based on the best-selling series of Ultima games which started on the Apple II and has grown into a veritable cult. Ultima Online is the first online multiplayer installment of Ultima. Amy began playing Ultima as part of her research for a book she was writing, Community Building on the Web. The book lays out design principles synthesized from her years of online strategic design consulting for sites like Ebay. Although many people have built particular online communities, Amy has a uniquely broad perspective, having worked with dozens of major clients in both entertainment and business. When Amy began playing Ultima Online I knew nothing about the game other than its name. Now I have heard her reports on hours of conversations with the folks at Origin, including Origin founder Richard Garriott, dozens of players, and assorted industry pundits. Although the Ultima universe is not my alternate reality of choice, I am fascinated by the thought that went into building it. Besides the usual difficulties of building software and maintaining an online service, Origin has essentially taken on the social challenges of running a city. The relationships that players form in Ultima are very real: for at least one player who moves cities often, her Ultima play partners are the most stable friendships in her life.

Commissioned for the wedding of Katrina (at top) and Ori Heffetz (at the bottom, in Hebrew, reading right to left). I based the lettering style on a style of Hebrew I see in modern temples. Here is the lovely way they sandblasted the design into a glass block, to make the symmetry apparent. Notice that the two names are etched on opposite faces of the block, adding depth to the design. The block can be removed from the base and flipped over.

SYMMETRY. 180 degree rotation. Turn this design upside down and each name reads the same both ways. INSPIRATION. Created during a week-long dance residency in Thousand Oaks, California, April 21-25. STORY. I improvised these two designs on the first names of the daughter and son of the organizer of our residency. Since the two names are related, I tried to make the lettering styles related. These two inversions illustrate two of the most common liberties I take with letterforms. If there is more than one copy of a letter in the same word, I prefer to make the shapes as similar as possible. In BRIANNA, however, the two A's are fundamentally different. With names, I prefer correct capitalization: either all capitals, initial capital and the rest lowercase, or if necessary. In JORDAN, however the J is uppercase and ODAN are lowercase, but R is uppercase.

SYMMETRY. Rotation by 180 degrees. Turn this design upside down and it reads the same. INSPIRATION. Revised version of a design created for Jimmy Stewart in February 1990 at Princeton University, New Jersey. STORY. In February 1990 I had the pleasure of meeting Jimmy Stewart at Princeton University. He had been invited back to his alma mater to receive an award from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and I was a visiting scholar in the art department. We met briefly as he toured the school, and I got to see what a gentleman he is in person. Since I was at Princeton teaching classes on inversions, I took the opportunity to do an inversion for Jimmy Stewart, which he enjoyed in his charming way. Meeting him made quite an impression. Two years later I created a puzzle for NewMedia magazine based on the movie It's a Wonderful Life, which features Mr. Stewart in his most well-known role. In making the puzzle I got to study his performance in detail. The puzzle appears in my book The NewMedia Magazine Puzzle Workout. Upon hearing of his recent passing, I decided to post the inversion on his name to this site. I was not satisfied with the legibility of the original, so I did the new version shown above. I added a glow and black frame to suggest black and white movies. For more information on Jimmy Stewart, visit the home page of the Jimmy Stewart Museum.

In the early 1990s I worked for a while with George Coates, creator extraordinary theatrical presentations which combined live performers, unusual moving sets, mesmerizing music, and overlaid projections that confused what was real and what was virtual. I told computer graphics producer Sally Rosenthal, who ran the momentous evening theater at the annual Siggraph conference, about George Coates. She immediately hatched a plan to hook George up with the graphics workstation company SGI (Silicon Graphics), and have him stage a show for one of their events. Here's a contemporary review of the show, and a technical rundown with images from the SIggraph archive. This is the logo I designed for that show. The title alludes to the space the show was staged in — a venue that George rented that was a uniquely tall church turned theatrical space in San Francisco. The logo is meant to capture the hair-raising effect of layered projections on live sets. I also designed graphics that was projected during the show...diagrams of the VALS (values and lifestyles) typology of consumer behaviors. Here's a video I made recently about VALS. I made the graphics on an SGI workstation using the 3d animation software SoftImage, which I had learned a year earlier while making the opening titles for the mathematical film Not Knot. The show was insanely ambitious, with live stereoscopic computer graphics) projected on a scrim in front of the stage. George's style of work was to start full rehearsals every night, and revise the entire production every night. It was an exhausting schedule that both pushed the crew and cast to new heights, and tended to burn people out. In one month, a first draft of the show was finished and staged for SGI, then for Siggraph, then as a theatrical show that ran for months. True to George's nature, the show continued to mutate during its run. All in all, George's productions epitomize the heady blend of creativity and technology that is so common in San Francisco, most famously embodied by Burning Man and the Maker Faire.

SYMMETRY. 180° rotation INSPIRATION. I first saw Cirque du Soleil in 1988 when their traveling big top first touched San Francisco. I immediately fell in love with their new take on what a circus can be, and have been immensely pleased to see them grow into a world-wide phenomenon. I set pencil to paper, and found that "Cirque du Soleil" works well. Fourteen years later I set mouse to pad and rendered what I had sketched. STORY. Started in 1984 as part of a government sponsored celebration in Quebec, Cirque reinvented the circus as a musical visual experience with great beauty and mystery, minus the animals and huckster vibe. I am reminded a bit of the great French magician Robert-Houdin, who reinvented magic as a sophisticated evening entertainment, rather than a carnival side show. At once traditional and avant garde, Cirque has struck a chord with audiences all over the world, and has become an institution with multiple shows and performing groups. "Circus" comes from the same root as "circle", referring to the circular stage in which traditional circuses are staged. "Soleil" means "sun", and the sun is the symbol of Cirque du Soleil. I have used the circle as the setting for this design, and incorporated elements that suggest moon, sun and stars. Explore the world of Cirque du Soleil at http://cirquedusoleil.com.

SYMMETRY. 180° rotation. INSPIRATION. In the 1970s I was a big fan of the emerging field of computer graphics, and spent many memorable evenings watching demo reels at Information International courtesy Richard Taylor, who has gone on to a spectacular career in special effects. This was the early days, when computer graphics was just starting to appear in TV commercials. When TRON was in the works — the first feature film to include extensive computer animation — I drew this ambigram and sent it to Richard. (The original was monochorme; this version has been enhanced with the metallic effect of the film's logo.) My ambigram didn't make it into the movie, but it did appear on the special effects crew jackets and hats.

From the book Inversions, animated for video Watch Your Language, shown at Siggraph '96. This animation was inspired by the film Space-filling Curves by Nelson Max, which features infinite zooms on self-similar recursive figures. Each E in the word TREE gives birth to two more smaller trees. A wall-sized version of this design can be seen at the Boston Museum of Science.

Created for Key Curriculum Press as a gift to Tomoko Fuse, 1996. Tomoko Fuse (the last name is Japanese, pronounced with two syllables) is a master of unit origami, in which many squares of paper folded into simple identical units interlock to form intricate polyhedral forms. Her book Unit Origami is published in the United States by Key Curriculum Press, a leading publisher of books and software for mathematics education. For this design I made letters out of the most common unit origami unit: isosceles right triangles in alternating colors.

Designed during a residency at Princeton University, February 1990. In 1990 cybernetic sculptor James Seawright invited me to Princeton University for a 2-week residency. During that delightful time I worked with students on creating inversions and exploring letterforms. My temporary office was in the art department, which housed both fine arts and performing arts. I was fascinated by the way each artform had a different characteristic body position: painters straddling wooden benches, ceramicists on high stools hunched over their work, dancers with bodies extended. I sketched a series of inversions on the names of all the different arts, a series I hope to realize as physical objects in the corresponding media. I made several versions of the word "Dance", including versions for jazz, modern, square and folk dance. This version was inspired by ballet.

SYMMETRY. Bilingual containment. "Esther" in Hebrew is hidden inside "Diamond" in English. INSPIRATION. Commissioned by my mother, Pearl Kim, in honor of Elise's Bat Mitzvah. STORY. Elise Diamond studies piano with my mother, Pearl Kim. She enters high school this fall and is also studying percussion. Esther is one of her several middle names. My mother is one of my most demanding patrons. She especially likes commissioning designs for her piano students. She sent this one back to the drawing board when the first version turned out to be too square and not feminine enough. "You can do better," she urged me, "and it's good for you stretch." This is the third bilingual English-Hebrew inversion I've done. I'm told that there are similar bilingual signs in Israel. Hebrew reads right to left, so it is especially interesting to combine it with a language that reads left to right. From right to left, the four Hebrew letters are Aleph (E), Samekh (S), Taw (T) and Resh (R). As is usually the case with inversions that involve a language in which I am not fluent, I'm never quite sure if the liberties I have taken are permissible. In this case the biggest liberty is introducing an extra stroke in the middle M/Taw; the rest of the Hebrew letters are rather ordinary.