Rotated Letters

Spell out a secret word by rotating or flipping letters. Most of the letters will be normal, but some will be placed in a weird orientation.

In the message above, an observant reader needs to see that there are 5 letters upside down. They spell out “cream”, which could be a secret password.

Using rotated or mirrored letters can be tricky. You need to make sure to use letters with enough asymmetry to be able to tell the transformed letters from normal ones. Letters like “o”, “x”, and “l” will be difficult to see.

Because letter options are often limited, another way to use rotated/flipped letters is simply change one letter of words to include in the secret.

In this message, there are upside-down letters in the words thirteen, one, and two, revealing the code 1312.

One way to create rotated letters is to use special characters of flipped letters, which can be copied from special Unicode characters. But a more versatile way to do it is to rotate or flip images of characters in an image editor.