ANNO’s head office is in the centre of Guimarães, a World Heritage city with several libraries and bookshops of reference for the world of antiquarian books. ANNO established itself as a neighbour to all of them in front of the Torre da Alfândega, an imposing medieval building that became a symbolic place when the phrase ‘Portugal was born here’ was affixed to it in the 1970s. A year later, it moved to the Couros area, recently added to the World Heritage UNESCO-listed Historical Centre, where animal skins have been processed since Roman times: the same skins used to bind books.

Our identity, designed by Paulo Alegria, uses characters that refer to the inscriptions of the Roman lapidary, a reference to the Western literary canon, universal history and the recovery of the memory of classical antiquity with the first presses during the Renaissance. Roboto, on the other hand, was developed specifically for reading on screens by Google between 2011 and 2017, with a design by Christian Robertson. In this way, our image combines the lost tradition of the ages with the screens of our time.