PART III     FontSite Archives Main Page   The Rules of Typography are reprinted from the book “Digital Type Design Guide” by Sean Cavanaugh (Hayden Books).

4. Use a smaller point size for all-uppercase text. When entering all-uppercase letters such as titles, acronyms, initials, and other capitalized text passages — WYSIWYG, BMWRA, USA, or any string of text made up of two or more capital letters — use a point size that is slightly smaller than the surrounding text. Otherwise, your capitals will SCREAM at the reader. In text that is 10-point, set the uppercase text to 8.5 points. Of course it depends on the typeface, but generally a reduction of 1–1.5 points is sufficient for text 11 points and smaller. A 2-pt or greater reduction may be necessary for text larger than 12 points. To see how well your CAPITALIZED text looks when you reduce its size, print it and turn the page upside down. It should blend in. If not, consider reducing the size a little more. Many programs have a formatting option called Small Caps, which creates a capital letter that is about 70–80% the size of the surrounding text. Unless you can adjust the setting (and in applications such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress you can), I think this is a tad too small. Just like you don’t want to draw attention to text that is too big, you also don’t want to draw attention to text that is too small. An optimal size for small caps is somewhere in the range of 80–90% of the size of the surrounding text. Another option is to use true small caps, if they are in fact available. But I often use small cap fonts for titles only, and not for capitalized text within normal text. Of course, you can use true small caps in such a fashion, and for fine typography you should. It’s easier, however, to type text from the regular font in all uppercase and then select it and reduce its point size, than it is to change to the small cap font, type the text, and then change it back to the regular font. There’s also the added benefit of using fewer fonts (the fewer fonts in a document, the quicker it will print). Compare the following four lines of type. The first line was set using Garamond 9-point with no size reduction and no additional letter spacing for the text in all caps. The second is set using Garamond 9-point with Garamond Small Caps 9-point. Both typefaces are set to the same size, but Garamond Small Caps looks a bit too small. The third is Garamond 9-point, but the capitalized text was reduced to 6.5 points (except for the initial ‘T’). This creates an interesting look, but notice how different it is from the true small caps in the 2nd and 4th paragraphs. The capitalized text appears slightly condensed. The final line is set using Garamond 9-point with Garamond Small Caps 9.5-point. If you combine a true small caps typeface with the normal typeface within text, you may need to increase the size of the small cap slightly (just a half a point in the above example made quite a noticeable difference.) 5. Add letterspacing to capitalized text and small caps. Letterspacing refers to the amount of space between letters in a word. Normal body text ordinarily needs no additional letterspacing beyond that which is built into the fonts. Capitalized text or small caps appearing within normal text can appear too tight and crowded compared to the surrounding text, and really needs to be loosened up a bit. Programs such as PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Illustrator, for example, refer to this letterspacing as tracking, and it should be set to a positive value for capitalized text. In PageMaker and Illustrator, consider setting the tracking to a value of 20 or so. In QuarkXPress, try a value of about 2 or 3 (obviously we’re talking different measurement systems in these programs, but the results are about the same). Most word processors don’t handle this as elegantly as page layout and illustration programs. Word 5.1 for the Macintosh, for example, lets you expand text as opposed to tracking it, but this can be problematic. The tracking features in the programs mentioned above adjust automatically to compensate if you decide to change the point size. Word’s expand setting, on the other hand, is a fixed value entered in points, so the amount of space it adds is the same regardless whether your text is 10 points or 100 points. There are exceptions to this: Nisus Writer offers tracking to letterspace text. If your word processor doesn’t have a tracking command, you should leave the text as is. Don’t add letterspacing by typing the Space Bar between letters. This adds way too much space.