When designing the Grand Guignol Theatre signage, first thing she did was to start drawing the lettering by hand, rather than use a font, because it would have been created by hand at the time, being the show was set in 1891. By hand-drawing the lettering, it meant that no two letters were going to be exactly the same and she her lettering got some really lovely, organic shapes and curves. Annie once said that “if I start with a font, when it’s not supposed to be a font, I’ll spend all day battling against it to try to stop it looking like a font. It’s easier just to pick up a pencil.” Drawing by hand in the past sometimes resulted in tiny letters, if the designer miss judges the amount of space they have. Annie replicates this imperfeciton by making the “o” in “Guignol” smaller than the other letters and added a dot below it to make the text fit the space. This all helps add to the historical realism of the piece.
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