John Langdon (typographer)

John Langdon (born April 19, 1946) is an American graphic designer, ambigram artist, painter, and writer.

The son of George Langdon, a teacher at The Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania, John Langdon attended that school from 1950-1964. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Dickinson College, graduating in 1968. A self-taught artist and graphic designer, Langdon has free-lanced as a lettering artist and logo design specialist since 1976. Known for his ambigrams, which he began developing in the late 1960s and early 70s, Langdon featured those and his essays in the book Wordplay, published in 1992. Langdon is known mostly through his association with Dan Brown, and the novels Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol and Inferno. The protagonist of these novels was named Robert Langdon as a tribute to John Langdon, and he will continue to be so for his next 12 books, an estimate given by Dan Brown himself.

Langdon is now a professor of typography and corporate identity at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He continues to do work on ambigrams, as well and fine art works that incorporate language, type, and philosophy.

Langdon credits his paternal grandparents for his equal interests in and abilities with images and language. His grandmother painted in Paris in the impressionist years preceding the turn of the 20th century. His grandfather was a poet, a translator, and a professor of Romance Languages at Brown University, whose translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy won him a decoration by Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III.

Langdon majored in English at Dickinson — with a particular interest in the History of the English Language — but began painting, tentatively, on his own before graduating. His strong emotional response to cubists Gris, Braque, and Picasso inspired what a painting instructor later referred to as “a pastiche of cubism.” While that comment discouraged Langdon’s painting efforts for a while, the cubist influence never left him. He considers Surrealists Dali and Magritte, and pop artists Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol significant influences, as well. Langdon took drawing and painting courses at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and The Philadelphia College of Art after graduating from Dickinson.

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