The SPOKE team caught up with David Beach – Web Manager at GFG Alliance, who has just released a book on his love of rebus puzzles, titled ‘Rebus Puzzles‘.

Growing up, I always enjoyed watching the popular UK game show “Catchphrase” with my family. The show features animated picture puzzles that contestants must solve by guessing well-known phrases or sayings. As a child, I would often shout out the answers, making it a fun and exciting experience.

In 2013, I wanted to recreate the joy of solving picture puzzles with my friends and family. After extensive research, I discovered that the type of puzzle I wanted to create is known as a “Rebus Puzzle.” Rebuses are pictures made up of letters, numbers, or images that cryptically represent a word, phrase, or saying.

To publish my puzzles, I wanted my own platform and decided to build a website using WordPress, which offered more flexibility and scalability than social media platforms. The most challenging part was coming up with the puzzles. I would start with the word or phrase first, and then work backwards to encrypt it with colours, sounds of letters/numbers, or images.

One of the most common ways of encrypting a Rebus is the positioning of the words and symbols, in terms of its place on the canvas area and to the other words and symbols in relation to it. You also sometimes need to think what other words might be used to describe a symbol, letter or word.

You may find sometimes a Rebus might have words or symbols that are not in the standard black, then you can expect the colour to be a relevant in the answer. Sometimes Rebus puzzles may make use of somewhat more obscure colour names like Rose.

Every now and then you get a Rebus puzzle with an image. The image will definitely form part or most of the clue.

I publish Rebus Puzzles on my website daily (www.rebuses.co), which has over 1,000 puzzles to solve. Over the past ten years, the website has grown in popularity, receiving approximately 1,200 visitors per day and a growing membership base. To mark the 10th anniversary of creating Rebus Puzzles, I published a book packed with over 350 rebus puzzles, each with helpful clues and descriptive answers to aid in solving.

If you have been thinking of writing a book, I highly recommend using Amazon’s self-publishing network (https://kdp.amazon.com/). They provide templates and require no costs upfront, printing books as they are sold. You can find my book of rebus puzzles on Amazon (UK).

Thank you for your support, and happy puzzling!