Chez Panisse Restaurant has a new web site, we are proud to announce. www.chezpanisse.com
We’ve used a cypher on the navigation that allows us to use hand-lettered type and keep the text searchable. The lettering took its cues from a film poster: Marcel Pagnol’s “Marius” (1931), part of the beloved “Fanny Trilogy,” a character from which the restaurant got it’s name.
For some of the early lettering tests, we worked with designer Cynthia Warren, who followed some very nice Deco-era examples. We also tried a few of our own, much less skilled versions of lettering, some 18th Century styles, and a “moderne” lettering. But in the end, felt these were too… stylized.
Although our final lettering wasn’t as pro as Cynthia’s, the process was fun, working both digitally and by hand to provide enough variation in character proportion to appear just a little bit off. Of course, letter spacing in the final navigation was also made deliberately random.
Lovely site for Chez Panisse!
Posted August 31, 2009 at 6:03 pm