The Ambigram Maker Story

In early 2004, software entrepreneur Mark Hunter created an ambigram that said his first name upright and his last name upside-down.  Hunter decided to have a Silver ring custom made from his ambigram design.

Although originally intended only for his own amusement, he received comments from people about the ring wherever he went.

He kept hearing how great the ambigram concept would be for couples, and he ended up designing dozens of ambigrams for couples that he knew before realizing that his system of hand-drawing ambigram designs just wasn't scalable. Hunter invented and sketched concepts for a scalable, software-based method of automatically creating ambigrams in 2004, but was bound to a work contract at the time.

"I'm a perfectionist, so I would sometimes take the better part of a day just to create a single design", said Hunter, "I needed a better, faster way to create high quality ambigrams".

In early 2007, Hunter began drafting the architecture and writing the code for the ambigram creator.  No one had ever created an automated system for generating high-quality ambigrams, and at the time, it was rumored to be impossible.  Hunter set a goal for himself to write a system that could create in seconds what can take a person hours to design.  That is, if the person could do it at all!

Hunter's goal of creating a scalable way to create ambigrams on demand was a big goal, but he reached it.  Today, Hunter's invention is capable of creating hundreds of thousands of ambigrams a day.