I've seen a lot of discussion about using All-Caps in comic dialog, and thought I'd throw some other options out there.

ALL-CAPS:

Smack that Caps Lock and all your characters can speak in letters that are as large as possible. Because All-Caps are basically block case (all letters are the same size) the maximum amount of space is given to letters, making them easier to read. Unfortunately, because of the way we use All-Caps on the internet, people NOW ASSOCIATE IT WITH YELLING! Also, few non-comics fonts were designed to be read this way, so you either need to stick to fonts designed for comics or sacrifice some of the elegance of your type.

Small Caps:

Small caps take the capital letter shapes and shrink them down for use as the lower case. There's two ways your software can do that. If the font has a Small Caps style, it'll probably look pretty slick. Otherwise, your software can scale down the capital letters (essentially the same thing as writing in all caps but making the font size smaller on the lower case letters). Here's an example of both:


The top one looks better because it's the Small Caps style. The line widths of both the upper and lowercase letters are the same. The second example is thinner as well as shorter, so it doesn't look as professional.

Small caps is more readable for the same reason as All-Caps. The letters are as large as possible, and use bold capital forms. However, with the reduced size and lack of ascenders (the tall part of letters like h and t) and descenders (dangly bits: j, p, q etc) the lettering can look a little cluttered. Also, it gives me a feeling of courts and legal documents.

Tall X-height:

The x-height of a font is a measure of how tall the parts of letters that aren't ascenders and descenders are. Basically it's the size of letter like x, z, and v. There's some debate about this, but in general people say that fonts with taller x-heights are more readable. By making the majority of the letters larger, (acemnosuvwxz all have heights based on the x-height) the font is easier to read. Letters that stick up or hang down (qtypdfghjklb) don't really need all that space for the sticky up hangy down bits right?



Don't take this too extreme though. This font has a huge x-height, and is harder to read because of it. Look at the word "Defiant" and compare the D and the e.


The great part about this compromise is that it looks just like a normal font, without any of the weird associations that come with overusing capital letter shapes. If you choose a font with large x-heights, you strike a nice balance between the two ends of the spectrum. I feel like options like this will become much more common in the future of graphic novels, as the days of superhero comics in all caps slowly fade (or become a separate industry).

CaMel CaSe:
AnD tHEre'S aLWayS CaMeL cAsE!

A quick point about small caps... be careful using software that does it for you instead of a typeface that has been designed with small caps as part of the set. If you at the examples posted, you'll notice that with the first (the actual small caps from the typeface) all of the letters are the same weight. In the second, that the software made by shrinking the capital letters, the first "L" in "Linux" is thicker than the rest of the word.

Typeface designers take this into account when they draw the typefaces. So actual small caps work. The software does a poor job of replicating this since it can't add to the characters. Most designers absolutely would not use the second method. If you want to use small caps, find a typeface that was designed with them.

Hope that helps!

Nice, thanks! An informative post.

@jnsmith beat me to it!

forced small caps is one of the biggest "amateur hour" typography maneuvers one can make, and its the most common Type Crime that I see out in the world, especially in comics. Its really a sign of an untrained, amateur typographer so you should be very wary of using it. There was even a movement by the Adobe user group for indesign to get Adobe to remove that forcing function from indesign. Very few typefaces (almost No sans serifs have it) have it, because it requires the type designer to draw a secondary set cap style glyphs and is a bit of an "old school" kinda thing. When I find a good small caps face, i'm super happy and it quickly moves to the top of my arsenal for body copy type.

True Story:

Back in design school i handed in a project that i was super proud of for the final. We had a very famous designer as a guest critique-er and i had forced small caps (last minute decision made outside of class)...he saw it immediately, called me on it, i was embarrassed beyond belief and vowed never to do it again...and now i see it almost immediately....come to think of it, i should write that designer and thank him. hahaha

Whoops... I love small caps and never really thought about it. Even used it in our logo.



No going back now. :P Dang. Does it look horrendous to the trained typographer eye? (ignore the jpg compression, my collaborator resized it without PS)

@nik---I really do like the lockup, but i notice the proportions. =( i noticed it immediately, But this is different in that its small caps, with the large cap letters being larger and varied in size as well, so its compounding the issue. Its something that a lot of trained design/typography people will notice.

You could redesign the logo with a proper small caps font, but the varied sizes will still be an issue. Something like what you have, would be a custom hand drawn job, to get the proportions to match if this was say a movie poster or something.

I don't see anything wrong with Niki's logo. Explanations, please? I'm a bit confused.

Here's Faux Small Caps and real Small Caps side by side (black text is the example, red is my annotation):



Courier New looks REALLY bad with fake small caps. Fontin doesn't look as bad, but there's clearly something wrong with it. But when you compare Fontin's real Small Caps one of them looks much more professional, no?

Niki's logo also increases the font size On The First Character In Each Word, which compounds the problem.

You gotta be pretty anal to detect some of this typography stuff, cause a lot of it only makes a subtle subconcious impact on the reader, but that impact snowballs and leaves a strong inarticulate impression. That said, I think Niki's logo still looks pretty good. The font she chose lends itself well to Faux Small Caps (unlike Courier New), and because the positioning of the text is so dynamic, my eye is drawn away from the slight differences in size. Chris will tell you never ever ever ever ever ever use Faux Small Caps. But... *whisper* sometimes you let it slide *ahem* I mean... never, ever, do that, cause it will always and immediately decrease the quality of your presentation. *ahem*

Niki, as a couple of people have mentioned, your logo is not "bad." In my opinion, you've used the larger caps much more like a "drop cap" like at the start of a magazine article than like "small caps."

But, if you did want to fix it I'd suggest that you just alter the large caps by converting them to outlines in Illustrator and manually altering the points. The way I would do this would be to have two layers with the exact same letters: one that I'd alter and one for reference to the original character shape. I'd make one layer say red and the other layer blue so that I can tell the difference between them. I've had to do this in order to customize tons of logos. It's a bit of a slow process, but you can do it.

As you said, it's in your logo and there's no going back now! So it's really up to you... It doesn't look horrendous, but typographers are pretty grumbly about this stuff.

@Ecna - Thanks! So it turns out I already got it, but like jsnsmith mentioned, it looks like the big letteres in the begining of an article (or an old book even) so actually there's nothing wrong with it. I can see how it's not exactly the wisest thing to do in a logo, though.

You font geeks... seriously.

Actually - the forced Short Caps bug me too. You can get around it by forcing a stroke to beef up the body of your letters, but a true fontophile can pick out where this has been done as well - they know the font so well, and know which fonts have additional small cap glyphs. THAT is pure geekery.

Now that Ecna has pointed this out, it is going to BUG all of you, because you're going to notice it more often. It's like finding a grey hair on your head. You didn't see it before, but now you find them all over.

Ah well... Thanks guys. XD Now I know to do better next time. Lettering is one of my weaker points in comic-making.

How else do you think new typophiles are born?

Forced Small caps are so prevalent in the comics industry, that you'll see in at least 75% of the comics you pick up...no joke.