John Langdon

John Langdon (born April 19, 1946) is an American graphic designer, ambigram artist, painter, and writer. Langdon has been a freelance artist specializing in logos, type, and lettering since 1977. He retired from teaching in Drexel University's graphic design program in November 2015 after 27 years of service. Early life John Wilbur Langdon was born on April 19, 1946, in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, to George Taft and Eleanor (née Hazard) Langdon. He has one brother, Courtney, who is the namesake of their grandfather, who himself was a Romance language professor at Brown University and was recognized by the Italian government for his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy from Italian into English blank verse. Langdon's grandmother was a painter in Paris during the impressionist era. As a teenager, Langdon was inspired by a graphic he had seen years before at a University of Pennsylvania football game. It showed two football players from opposing teams crouched next to each other; from the viewpoint depicted in the image, the players' numbers spelled out the word hell. He experimented with words in this way throughout his childhood and into college and his "earliest significant inspiration" was Salvador Dalí. Other inspirations throughout the formative years of Langdon's ambigrams included the yin and yang symbol, M. C. Escher, psychedelic art and lettering, Rick Griffin, Herb Lubalin, cubism, René Magritte, Edgar Allan Poe, Ogden Nash, John Barth, and Tom Robbins. Langdon attended Episcopal Academy, the school where his father worked, before attending Dickinson College. There, he played four years of college soccer, took studio painting classes, and majored in English. He is largely a self-taught artist. Langdon successfully avoided the Vietnam War draft through legal student deferment, one of his goals in seeking higher education.