
Uppercase and lowercase letters from regular fonts complement each other in size and style, but using only uppercase letters from them can result in disproportionate and clashing characters. To ensure a clean and polished look, use a true all-caps font instead of capital letters from a regular font such as Arial or Helvetica. Keep all-caps headings brief and avoid overusing swash characters, which can seem visually busy. Good UX design is smooth, so it’s best to limit capital letter fonts to short bursts of text you want to call attention to, like logos, headings, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Remember, balancing visual impact with a practical user experience (UX) is an important consideration when using all caps.
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All caps may signal urgency and importance, for example, or depending on the font, a more traditional and professional appearance. Ultimately, choosing a letter case depends on various design considerations and goals, including the project’s tone and style, the target audience, and the message the designer aims to communicate.

While the ease of reading lowercase compared to uppercase letters remains controversial, its impact on design choices is subject to debate. Typographers often argue that lowercase letters are inherently easier to read because they create less uniform word shapes, but their readability is more likely down to practice. But if people use assistive technologies, screen readers may interpret the all-caps text as an acronym and read it letter by letter, leading to misinterpretation and frustration. On the other hand, all-caps text is more legible for people with visual impairments when reading directly from the screen. That’s because it slows down reading for many and is harder for people with dyslexia and other cognitive processing disorders to read. Current best practice for website fonts is to avoid using all caps for long stretches of text, especially body text. When it comes to accessibility, all-caps text can be a double-edged sword. Otherwise, you risk overwhelming the reader - or losing them altogether. But if you use all-caps text, doing it correctly is a must. On websites, all-capital fonts still carry some of the gravitas of a Roman inscription: They grab the viewer’s attention and firmly anchor a user’s journey around the site. Nevertheless, uppercase and lowercase characters still help effectively guide the eye from one sentence to the next and differentiate proper nouns from their common counterparts. These days, most writing happens on keyboards and device screens instead of chisels and stones or quills and parchment. As writing methods evolved, the alphabet changed to match: Curved letters became more prevalent as ink and parchment made it easier to write them quickly. The angular letters suited the Romans because they were easier to carve into hard surfaces like stone and marble. Latin inscription on Trajan’s Column, 113 CE Source: Alan H

That’s because capital letters were the alphabet - the Romans had no lowercase letters.Ī classic example is the inscription on Trajan’s Column, a monument commemorating Roman emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars, from 113 CE. If you were a fourth-century BCE Roman engraver (arguably the ancient version of a graphic designer), your inscriptions would be in all caps. To understand why designers have to manage two separate sets of characters, it’s worth doing a whirlwind tour through typological history. The origins of uppercase and lowercase textĬapital letters are a quirk of the Latin alphabet - many other writing systems do just fine without them. But first, let’s go back in time to the origins of capital letters.
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We’ll show you some of our favorite all-caps fonts and explore how to navigate accessibility issues that uppercase letters can present. But with so many options, picking the best font can be daunting. That’s why if you’re considering an all-uppercase strategy, choosing the right script is a crucial design choice.
