John Langdon
John Langdon was born in Pennsylvania on April 19th, 1946 and is the Painter. At the age of 78, John Langdon biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 78 years old, John Langdon physical status not available right now. We will update John Langdon's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.
John Langdon, born April 19, 1946, is an American graphic designer, ambigram artist, painter, and writer.
John Langdon, a Merion, Pennsylvania, teacher, attended the Episcopal Academy from 1950-1964.
He earned his bachelor's degree in English from Dickinson College, graduating in 1968.
Langdon, a self-taught artist and graphic designer, has been practising as a lettering artist and logo design specialist since 1976.
Langdon, who is best known for his ambigrams, began developing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was featured in the book Wordplay, which was published in 1992.
Langdon is best known for his books Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Inferno, and Origins, as a result of Dan Brown's collaboration.
As a thank you to John Langdon, Robert Langdon was the protagonist of these books. Langdon, a typography and corporate identity professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is now a professor of typography and corporate identity.
He continues to work on ambigrams, as well as fine art works that use language, style, and philosophy.
Early life
John Wilbur Langdon was born in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, on April 19, 1946, to George Taft and Eleanor Langdon, née Hazard. Courtney, their grandfather's namesake, who was a Romance language professor at Brown University and was praised by the Italian government for his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy from Italian to English blank verse. During the impressionist period, Langdon's grandmother was a painter in Paris.
Langdon, a teen, was inspired by a graphic he had seen years before at a University of Pennsylvania football game. Two football players from opposing sides crouched next to each other; from the perspective depicted in the photograph, the players' numbers spelled out the word hell. Throughout his childhood and into college, he experimented with words in this way, and Salvador Dal was his "earliest significant inspiration." Among Langdon's ambigrams's early years were the yin and yang symbol, M. C. Escher, psychedelic art, and lettering, Rick Griffin, Herb Lubalin, René Magritte, Edgar Allan Poe, Ogden Nash, John Barth, and Tom Robbins.
Prior to attending Dickinson College, Langdon attended Episcopal Academy, the academy where his father worked. He played four years of college soccer, took studio painting lessons, and majored in English. He is mainly a self-taught artist. Langdon managed to avert the Vietnam War draft through student deferment, one of his priorities in seeking higher education.
Personal life
Jessica Langdon and his partner Lynn have one daughter, Jessica. Langdon spent his time in Drexel between Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood and "a walk in the Pennsylvanian woods." Following his release from Drexel in 2015, he and his partner migrated to the Central Coast of California.
Career
Langdon spent time at Walter T. Armstrong Typography, "setting headlines for ad copy" and teaching drawing, painting, and advertising classes at Philadelphia College of Art in the evenings. He was inspired by magazines such as Communication Arts, Graphis, and Lettergraphics to pursue his interest in typography and logo design. He spent five years with Sulpizio Associates, where he mainly produced pharmaceutical brochures after leaving Armstrong. Langdon, a stay-at-home dad and freelance artist specializing in logos, font, and lettering, began his work in 1977 after his daughter's birth. In 1972, he created his first ambigram, which he described as a "upside-down word." Langdon believes that both he and Stanford graduate student Scott Kim invented ambigrams, but separately. Kim called his creations inversions, although Douglas Hofstadter coined the word ambigram in 1984. Langdon's first ambigram ambigram was of the word STARSHIP to Jefferson Starship for their 1976 album Spitfire. He taught lettering and logo design at Moore College of Art and Design for three years before joining the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design in Drexel University to teach lettering and logo design. Langdon began to paint words in the 1990s.
When making ambigrams, Langdon emphasizes philosophy, particularly Taoism. "The lesson of Taoism is that if you have only one vantage point, you are not seeing the truth," he said in an interview with the Orange County Register in 2006. Langdon discusses everyday objects and situations that often go unnoticed by mathematics, particularly Fibonacci sequences, bell curves, and normal distribution.
Wordplay, Langdon's first book about ambigrams, was published in 1992 by Three Rivers Press. Each ambigram was followed by a philosophical essay. Dick Brown, a math professor, contacted him with questions regarding his craft and also asked if he'd be interested in designing a cover for his son Dan's new album, Angels and Demons. Brown's music career fell apart, but he contacted Langdon again a few years later to request the re-use of the original Angels and Demons ambigram as well as the commission of Langdon for more, this time for his book Angels & Demons. The two became close friends and Langdon's contribution to Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and subsequent books was partially inspired by him. Langdon also produced the animated title for the Da Vinci Code film as well as the logo of the Depository Bank of Zurich, a fictional bank depicted in the film. In 2005, Wordplay's second edition was released.
Hal Taylor, a fellow graphic designer, and the Type Directors Club received an award for their font Flexion in 2007. Typedia, a wiki-style font library, was two years ago, along with Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Liz Danzico, and Dan Cederholm. In 2012, he curated an exhibit that featured word paintings based on Rorschach experiments. This was inspired by an Andy Warhol exhibition in the 1990s that featured Warhol's Rorschach paintings. Langdon gave a Tedx talk at Drexel in 2013. "The connection between major changes in typesetting technology and the appearance of horrible new fonts has existed since the introduction of horribly new fonts."
Langdon has performed for John Mayer, Aerosmith, Sony Pictures, Direc TV, Nike, and Will Shortz among other things over the course of his career. His work has been seen in galleries around the country, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, Type Directors Club, Noyes Museum, Shipley School, University of Maryland, and Drexel University. His work has also appeared in U&lc Magazine, Letter Arts Review, and the annual Type Directors Club. Langdon has written an article about design for journals, including Critique; forewords for books such as The Art of Deception by Brad Honeycutt and Eye Twisters by Burkard Polster; and prefaces to titles such as Calligraffiti by Niels Shoe Meulman. He is or has been a member of The One Club, Scribes, and the Type Directors Club. Langdon resigned from Drexel in November 2015 after 27 years.