Drop shadows – up, down, left or right?

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…