Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels

by Scott Kim

Book Overview

Backword by Jef Raskin "Inversions" are words that read the same upside down or in a mirror. Or words cleverly hidden inside other words. Each has something to fool the eye, a special visual trick; at the same time the words Kim has chosen to illustrate in this imaginative catalog of challenging visual wordplay reflect the idea of symmetry, both in art and in science. Sixty pages of images portray short and long words, words describing symmetries,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0070345465
• ISBN13: 9780070345461
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: BYTE
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Inspiring letters

I can't stop looking at this book. I already used his concepts to do the alphabetic origami that he does so well for friends and family. Then I actually read the text (side irony: I was too involved in looking at the words to read) and the ideas he gives are great food for thought. Delicious in fact.

Yes except for the Sun logo!

I bought this book after reading Douglas Hofstadter's GEB. I liked it a lot; I'm the type who fiddles with logos and word- and letter-forms a lot.The Sun Microsystems logo is a well-known "inversion" that Scott Kim didn't make. I even tried to congratulate him on it once. It's by Vaughn Pratt.Kim, according to a comment on his web site, did the original Silicon Graphics (SGI) logo.

Excellent book for unique typographical posibilities

I think that every graphitti artist should read this book before defacing a wall. It was written by the designer of the logo for Sun Microsystems and a few others. It is a really facinating book, it shows you how to think the same way as the author, and how to design text that can be read as one word right-side up, and as another up-side down. I highly recommend it.Darius