Can't believe I didn't notice this until recently, having been a Phoenix Suns fan for ages. Maybe it's a recent redesign of their logo. But check it out:
The word "SUNS" reads the same rightside up or upside down. The logo is painted at center court, and during a game earlier this year, when they switched camera views, I noticed this cool design. A little research online found this Wiki entry. Apparently, this is called a rotational ambigram (there are other types of ambigrams, as explained in Wiki). It goes on to say they are sometimes called vertical palindromes. If you do an ambigram image search on Google, you'll see a ton of other examples -- including an ambigram of "ambigram." Looks to my left-brain that this is a very difficult art.
Not really a question ... just something interesting I thought I'd share.
Won 38, lost 43. Must be working, because Phoenic is a LONG way from basketball country, and without it, they'd probably have won 16, lost 65.
Of course, Duke isn't in basketball country. either; I think they're using some of Dr. Rhine's research to confound their opponents....
(Removing tongue from cheek, congrats on an interesting find.)
deaconB said: Of course, Duke isn’t in basketball country. either; I think they’re using some of Dr. Rhine’s research to confound their opponents….
Couldn't agree with you more. Especially since I'm a UW alum. Great game, but a sad loss. I lost $50 to a Duke alum on that one.
There's definitely been a redesign of the Suns logo since the first time I looked at it, but it's always been an ambigram.
And there's nothing particularly hard about creating them. Here's one I did years ago with my first animated-gif editor (the file name is umop apisdn):
Ron Draney said: And there’s nothing particularly hard about creating them.
Well sure, if you limit yourself to the letters that automatically work upside down, although you did do something funky with that"a/e", and I note that the "u/n" is the same style font used in the Suns logo ... that wouldn't work with all fonts.
It's also easier if you don't care if the upside down word is nonsensical. I was talking about the ambigrams I saw on that Google Image search, where each letter is like a custom font the artist designed. Now that takes a fair amount of skill and creativity.
Of course, before I could call "umop apisdn" nonsensical, I had to Google it. Got 114,000 hits. Most were just noting that it's an ambigram. But it looks like there's at least one band that's using it for their name, and it's also entered the Online Slang Dictionary with the given meaning "upside down and backwards" which I'd guess is some kind of disparaging adjective. Not sure. They don't provide a definition or synonym. And I never heard it before.