Yesterday evening I presented a talk for the Letter Exchange at The Artworkers Guild on Queen Square. The subject was The Signwriters of Old London and I shared with them my observations and research about some of the people and companies who created beautiful carved and gilded shop fascias or hand-painted ads on buildings.
The Q&A after the talk was really good and one question was about drop shadows on letters. It was suggested that here in the UK, we tend to apply the shadows on the other side to those he'd seen in Germany. I responded that I've seen this 3D effect applied on both left and right sides.
Intrigued by this, and wondering if there were indeed more signs dressing to the left or right, I've made some screen grabs of some of my picture archive to see if there's a winner, and it turns out there is.
Here are the ones with the 3D/drop shadow effect at the bottom right, making the letters look like they are standing out above us, as if we are looking up at them:
The next ones show the shadow falling to the left:
The drop shadow to the right wins with 20, compared to 6 to the left = approx 75% of the signs. However, I do notice that most of the latter are post-war area. I wonder what that's about?!
But here's an oddity – at Lloyd's old dairy the name above the door has the drop shadow at bottom left, yet the script along the adjacent windows is the other way:
I think the drop shadow choice depends on the style of letters employed because the words/names need to be clearly legible. It was suggested last night that it was quicker and cheaper to produce the shadows from one direction which I think must be to the left because, with most letters having a vertical on the left side it is quicker/easier to achieve – for instance, using the Lloyds sign above as an example, if the shadows went the other way the internal of the vertical on the letter L would need to be rendered as well as small end of the bottom bar. Plus there's that curve on the D.
To illustrate that a shadow in any direction can produce different results, I have cobbled together these rudimentary examples, the bottom two showing the letters dropping down towards us:
What do you think?
