John Langdon

John Langdon (April 19, 1946 – January 1, 2026) was an American graphic designer, ambigram artist, painter and writer. From 1977, Langdon worked as a freelance artist specializing in logos, type, and lettering. Langdon's grandmother was a painter

Langdon attended Episcopal Academy, the school where his father worked, before attending Dickinson College. He is largely a self-taught artist. By 1980, Langdon claims both he and Stanford graduate student Scott Kim invented ambigrams, albeit separately. Kim called his creations inversions; in 1984, Douglas Hofstadter coined the term ambigram. Langdon uses mathematics, particularly Fibonacci sequences, bell curves, and normal distribution to "explore relationships of everyday objects and situations that often go unnoticed".

In 1992, Three Rivers Press published Wordplay, Langdon's first book about ambigrams. Each ambigram was accompanied by a philosophical essay. Math professor Dick Brown contacted him with questions about his craft and also asked if he would be interested in designing a cover for his son Dan's new album, Angels and Demons. Langdon later created the animated title for The Da Vinci Code film as well as the logo of the Depository Bank of Zurich, a fictional bank in the movie.

In 2007, Langdon and fellow graphic artist Hal Taylor won an award from the Type Directors Club for their font Flexion. Two years later, along with Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Liz Danzico, and Dan Cederholm, Langdon created Typedia, a wiki-style font library. In 2012, he put on an exhibition that showed word paintings based on Rorschach tests.

Over the course of his career, Langdon has done work for John Mayer, Aerosmith, Sony Pictures, DirecTV, Nike, and Will Shortz, among others. His work has also been featured in U&lc Magazine, Letter Arts Review, and in the Type Directors Club annual. Langdon has provided design criticism for magazines such as Critique; forewords for books such as The Art of Deception by Brad Honeycutt and Eye Twisters by Burkard Polster; and prefaces for publications such as Calligraffiti by Niels Shoe Meulman. He has been a member of the Type Directors Club, the Society of Scribes, and The One Club.

Personal life and death Langdon and his wife Lynn had one daughter, Jessica.