Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

13. All Caps

All caps are more difficult to read. That’s just a fact: we recognize a word not only by its letters, but by the shape of the whole word. When text is in all caps, every word has the same shape so we have to go back to reading letter by letter.

All caps are fine sometimes, when you consciously choose to accept their lower readability because you need the look of all caps. But when you’re setting headlines, subheads, lists in a parts directory, catalog entries, or other items that need to be skimmed and absorbed quickly, all are read more easily and quickly if they are in lowercase. If you use all caps because you want the words to stand out, or because it makes them appear larger and you think it’s easier to read, THINK AGAIN. Find ...