John Langdon, 79, formerly of Philadelphia, innovative award-winning graphic designer, painter, writer, and longtime adjunct professor of typography at Drexel University, died Thursday, Jan. 1, of complications from a heart attack at French Hospital Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Mr. Langdon was a lifelong artist and wordsmith. He originated ambigrams in the early 1970s and created distinctive logos for corporate clients, artists, musicians, and others. Ambigrams are words or designs that retain meaning when viewed from different perspectives, and his work influenced countless other designers and typographers who followed.
“They also present familiar concepts in an unfamiliar way,” he told The Inquirer in 1992, “and thus stimulate the reader’s imagination.”
On his website, johnlangdon.net, Mr. Langdon described his work as “making abstract concepts visual, almost always through the design of words, letters, and symbols.” He called it “words as art” and said: “I specialize in the visual presentation of words.”
His designs were featured in more than a dozen solo shows in galleries and museums in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware, and in more than 50 group exhibitions around the country and Europe. He created six ambigrams for author Dan Brown’s best-selling book, Angels & Demons, and Brown named his fictional protagonist, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, after John Langdon.
“John’s art changed the way I think about symmetry, symbols, and art,” Brown told The Inquirer in 2006.
Mr. Langdon’s own book about ambigrams, Wordplay, was first published in 1992 and updated in 2005. He also wrote the forwards of other books and articles for journals and newsletters. He said he had a “particular interest in word origins” in an interview on his website.
He was featured several times in The Inquirer and wrote an op-ed piece in 2014 about the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new logo. He opened the article with: “Please, beloved Philadelphia Museum of Art, before you print one piece of stationery or a single promotional flier, reconsider your new logo.”
In 1996, he began painting what he called his “visual-verbal meditations and manipulations” on canvas. “My paintings still involve symmetry and illusion, a bit of philosophy, and a few puns thrown in for good measure,” he said on his website.
He cocreated the Flexion typeface and won a 2007 award from the New York-based Type Directors Club. He spoke often about design at colleges and high schools, and to professional societies. He gave a TEDx talk about font and the future of typeface at Drexel.
Douglas Hofstadter, a professor at Indiana University who coined the term ambigram in 1984, told The Inquirer in 2006 that Mr. Langdon had a “very strong sense of legibility but also a marvelous sense of esthetics, flow, and elegance.”
Born in Wynnewood and reared in Narberth, Mr. Langdon graduated from Episcopal Academy in 1964 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. He worked in the photo-lettering department of a type house and for a design studio in Philadelphia after college, and began freelancing as a logo designer, type specialist, and lettering artist in 1977.
He taught typography and logo design classes at Moore College of Art and Design from 1985 to 1988 and at Drexel from 1988 to his retirement in 2015. In an online tribute, one student said he was “one of my favorite teachers of all time.”
He was interested in Taoism and inspired by artists Salvador Dalí and M.C. Escher, and authors Edgar Allan Poe and Ogden Nash. “In the early ’70s, I tried to do with words what Dali and Escher did with images,” he said in a 2006 interview posted on Newswise.com.
John Wilbur Langdon was born April 19, 1946. He played high school and college soccer and drew caricatures of classmates for the Episcopal yearbook.
After college, he took painting and drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the old Philadelphia College of Art. He married Lynn Ochsenreiter, and they had a daughter, Jessica. They divorced later.
Mr. Langdon enjoyed vacation road trips and told stories of hitchhiking around the country in the 1960s. He followed the Phillies, was interested in genealogy, and traced his family back to the Founding Fathers.
He lived in Darby, Woodbury, Wenonah, and Philadelphia before moving to California in 2016. “He was jovial, social, and amusing,” his daughter said. “People said he was clever, and everyone liked him.”
He told The Inquirer in 2006: “It may seem counterintuitive, but the more ambiguity you invite into your life, the more things make sense and become understandable.”
In addition to his daughter and former wife, Mr. Langdon is survived by a brother, Courtney, and other relatives.
A memorial is to be held later.
