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STONE CARVER JOHN BENSON PICKS UP ILLUSTRATOR BEFORE HIS CHISEL
What could be more challenging than designing type? Doing it in granite. John Benson, the renowned stone carver and lettering artist from Newport, Rhode Island, relies on Adobe® Illustrator® to create the beautiful, meticulous lettering seen on some of the United States' most prominent monuments and buildings.
Benson's letterforms are an integral part of the John F. Kennedy Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, Virginia; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles; and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Architect Maya Lin also consulted with him on the inscriptions for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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| Stone carver John Benson designed the lettering for the Roosevelt Memorial in Adobe Illustrator. As visitors walk through FDR's life, Benson's inscriptions convey Roosevelt's eloquent words. |
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| But not all of Benson's letters are carved in stone. The Adobe Type Library features three Benson-designed typefaces: Alexa™, Balzano™, and Caliban™.
Speed and flexibility
One of Benson's recent successes - and a project, he says, on which Illustrator afforded him an uncommon degree of flexibility - is the seven-acre Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in West Potomac Park, Washington, D.C. The memorial was designed by architect Lawrence Halprin, who asked Benson to create the lettering for the Roosevelt quotations that appear on the memorial's central element, a large granite wall.
The unique design of the wall, explains Benson, "defines four informal spaces, each of which relates to one of Roosevelt's terms in office and features inscriptions of the President's remarks made during those periods." |
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