I know that only the first letter of a sentence should normally be capitalised, but I see so many people placing a capital letter on every word in a header, page title or bullet list. Is there any kind of consensus of what is correct and acceptable for web design these days?
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Sometime around 3/6/09 (at 04:17 -0400) Ashley said:
Is there any kind of consensus of what is correct and acceptable for
web design these days?
Good grammer, good spelling, good punctuation. If someone needs to
resort to tricks such as using initial caps for each word just to be
noticed then their underlying design stinks.
k
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2009/6/3 Ashley email@hidden:
I know that only the first letter of a sentence should normally be capitalised, but I see so many people placing a capital letter on every word in a header, page title or bullet list. Is there any kind of consensus of what is correct and acceptable for web design these days?
There isn’t really a correct method - it’s more a matter of design
that’s changed over time. (A couple of hundred years ago capitals
could pop up all over the place in text). Nowadays it’s usual to
capitalise only the beginning of a heading. There are style guides
that are worth checking but ultimately it’s up to you to decide how
you want the page to look.
From The Guardian:
"Times have changed since the days of medieval manuscripts with
elaborate hand-illuminated capital letters, or Victorian documents in
which not just proper names, but virtually all nouns, were given
initial caps (a Tradition valiantly maintained to this day by Estate
Agents).
“A look through newspaper archives would show greater use of capitals
the further back you went. The tendency towards lower case, which in
part reflects a less formal, less deferential society, has been
accelerated by the explosion of the internet: some web companies, and
many email users, have dispensed with capitals altogether. Our style
reflects these developments. We aim for coherence and consistency, but
not at the expense of clarity. As with any aspect of style, it is
impossible to be wholly consistent – there are almost always
exceptions, so if you are unsure check for an individual entry in this
guide.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide
The Chicago guide is one of the most respected, but not free:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
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Good grammer, good spelling
And who spotted the deliberate mistake? (Okay, it was pre-coffee just
before rushing my son to his A-level exams. Doh!)
k
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Keith’s words are, to my mind, are a little too pedantic, but the
sentiment is right. Roger paints with a broader brush and the clue to
it all lies within the extract from The Guardian. Just one word:
CLARITY (Oops, sorry, clarity).
Capitals should never be used for copious amounts of copy (and we’ve
all seen websites from folk that have the caps lock superglued down),
but subtle and consistent use in short descriptive headings can be a
perfectly acceptable design style. However, like all design cues, it
doesn’t bear over use.
In Keith’s words, “Good grammer, good spelling, good punctuation”
always come first, but if everyone stuck exactly to the rules, life -
and web sites - would become all too similar - and boring.
The one anathema to me, though is not inappropriate use of uppercase,
but those folk who mix colours by the million and stick hunky logos
everywhere, the worst being within the headline. (Screams, tears hair
and just manages to stop typing expletives!). They destroy clarity and
are usually a pain to read.
Use your common sense: if it looks right and provides the information
the search engines demand, you can’t go far wrong.
Colin
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An I didn’t even correct it when I quoted you! And me a grammar school
boy, too!!
Colin
On 3 Jun 2009, at 10:53, Keith Martin wrote:
Good grammer, good spelling
And who spotted the deliberate mistake? (Okay, it was pre-coffee
just before rushing my son to his A-level exams. Doh!)k
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Sometime around 3/6/09 (at 10:55 +0100) Colin Alcock said:
but if everyone stuck exactly to the rules […]
Therein lies a long, long conversation! 
But all I’ll say is this:
the only way to break rules truly effectively is by knowing them
thoroughly.
k
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With that, I totally agree.
And as a copywriter, I’ve certainly broken a few!
Colin
On 3 Jun 2009, at 11:12, Keith Martin wrote:
Sometime around 3/6/09 (at 10:55 +0100) Colin Alcock said:
but if everyone stuck exactly to the rules […]
Therein lies a long, long conversation!
this: the only way to break rules truly effectively is by knowing
them thoroughly.k
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My confusion has increased recently, since my wife started working at a local college, while training to become a teacher.
They seem to write in a style, which is completely alien to anything I learned at school. The capitalisation of words is not merely accepted but strongly encouraged and she has had these words “corrected” to include capitals. You can’t name a course, job title or department for example without having a capital letter for every word. It’s almost treated as a sign of disrespect.
There are other examples as well, such as practices in letter writing, which seem strange, so while I tend towards the traditional, I found myself compiling a bullet list yesterday on a new site and asking myself what best to do.
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I think this adoption of ‘Capitals’ in the education sphere is
probably a reflection of this PC world we live in - and I’m not
talking computers - where deference is given to everyone’s status and
departmental structure for fear of upsetting the individual. It used
to be the same in business, years ago, but unless there’s been a
resurgence since I ‘retired’ from mainstream activity, this proved to
be a passing phase and a much more relaxed and grammatically correct
pattern followed.
As Keith said, get to know the rules as they should be applied and
don’t let yourself be pushed unnecessarily into the vagaries of
fashion. Unless your client is very insistent on a specific format,
you have the power to advise.
As for bullets: initial capitals to individual words (other than the
first) usually look ghastly!
Colin
On 3 Jun 2009, at 11:23, Ashley wrote:
My confusion has increased recently, since my wife started working
at a local college, while training to become a teacher.They seem to write in a style, which is completely alien to anything
I learned at school. The capitalisation of words is not merely
accepted but strongly encouraged and she has had these words
“corrected” to include capitals. You can’t name a course, job title
or department for example without having a capital letter for every
word. It’s almost treated as a sign of disrespect.There are other examples as well, such as practices in letter
writing, which seem strange, so while I tend towards the
traditional, I found myself compiling a bullet list yesterday on a
new site and asking myself what best to do.
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SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET CAN LOSE YOU CREDIBILITY! but when I receive ALL
CAPS in an email from my Grammar - I accept it is because of her being
somewhat deaf. (if not dead!).
Cleverclogs can take what is considered a gross mistake and make a new
design statement from it. Ultimately this can just lead to a fragmented
interface of design where the designer cleverness is employed in a market
that feels compelled to manipulate ever more cunningly - and which then
starts to become ‘mapped out like bad blocks on a HD’ in the mind at large -
not unlike politicians or media in general).
I find all caps is far less readable than ‘Sentence caps’ or ‘Word Caps’.
On typewriters caps were the way to emphasise.
Now we have so many other ways to differentiate text.
There is a memorial to Thomas Coke, (great agricultural pioneer), near where
I live and its engraved inscription uses quite arbitrary rules for
capitalization that escape any order I can see.
As my mail is light hearted I will share one of his inscriptions that has no
relavance whatsoever to Caps.
Thomas Coke
Small in Stature
Great in Valve
(I read it thus before realising that stone masons didn’t curve their U)
all the best
Brian
Keith Martin said recently:
Good grammer, good spelling
And who spotted the deliberate mistake? (Okay, it was pre-coffee just
before rushing my son to his A-level exams. Doh!)k
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 10:53, Keith Martin wrote:
And who spotted the deliberate mistake? (Okay, it was pre-coffee
just before rushing my son to his A-level exams. Doh!)
We’ll Let You Off Just This Once
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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In this case there is no paying client and I am designing a single page website to sell an ebook, which I have recently written. Part of that page includes a bullet list of topics covered and I started to do it normally, but saw other sites were doing it very differently.
I agree with ColinJA that this use of capitals is very likely a PC thing and I hate all of that, but on the other hand, if people have become conditioned to seeing capitals everywhere do they then interpret normally written points as somehow being less important? I hate writing with the caps locked on full time but “Thomas Coke Small in Stature Great in Valve” style writing appears to be increasingly common.
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 14:05, Ashley wrote:
… “Thomas Coke Small in Stature Great in Valve” style writing
appears to be increasingly common.
In which case you might stand our more if you do it the “old way” and
style your type matter to sit clearly on the page. It certainly wont
seem less important IMHO.
Colin
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I’ve just done a test on the web page and I am inclined to think now that it looks better with just the first word capitalised.
My only reservation is in cases where comparisons are made. For example:
“Film v digital” almost infers that film is more important than digital, whereas “Film v Digital” looks more balanced. This not a question of grammar really but simply what will look best.
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Also there are some cases where it seems typical to see certain letters always presented in capitals, such as B&W as an abbreviation for black & white. At least with wholly capitalised words in a bullet list these imbalances won’t occur.
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 14:30, Ashley wrote:
I’ve just done a test on the web page and I am inclined to think now
that it looks better with just the first word capitalised.My only reservation is in cases where comparisons are made. For
example:“Film v digital” almost infers that film is more important than
digital, whereas “Film v Digital” looks more balanced. This not a
question of grammar really but simply what will look best.
That’s Keith’s point - Know the rules and you know when you can break
them, especially for balance.
Colin
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 10:55, Colin Alcock wrote:
In Keith’s words, “Good grammer, good spelling, good punctuation”
always come first, but if everyone stuck exactly to the rules, life
- and web sites - would become all too similar - and boring.
And thereby hangs an interesting discussion, which would probably be
too long to do here. But basically: there are all kinds of trends in
design, whether web or print, and they are to be welcomed, because
they can get you noticed. But there are some things that can never be
trends. Among them is, for instance, the increasingly prevalent use of
apostrophes in plurals. So we now get ‘Video’s’, ‘PC’s’ and all the
rest, which used to only appear on greengrocer’s hand-lettered
notices, (‘cauli’s 99p’) and famously became known as ‘grocer’s
apostrophe’. I think the capitalisation of every word in a headline is
fast becoming one of these.
The thing is that, although we can go with trends and adopt some out-
of-the-box strategies to present our designs, there are some things
that are not open to interpretation, and this is one of them. Both the
capitalisation of words in a sentence, and the insertion of
apostrophes in plurals, are just plain wrong. Not a trend, just wrong.
I realise that the use of these things by politically-correct official
bodies will probably lead to increased usage, but we need to fight it.
So: the use of apostrophes in plurals is, and always will be a
mistake; it’ll never be a trend, because it’s broken behaviour. The
use of all those caps in sentences is not, at the moment, seen as such
a mistake, but it is.
I still get email and printed material from people who put a double
space after a full-stop. This harks back to the time when we all used
typewriters with a monospaced font, and people were taught to do that
to better differentiate the gap between sentences. And it did. The
only place you can see a typewriter being used these days is
(unaccountably) in The Wire. Yet it still hangs on, after all these
years. Funny business
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 14:30, Ashley wrote:
“Film v digital” almost infers that film is more important than
digital, whereas “Film v Digital” looks more balanced. This not a
question of grammar really but simply what will look best.
I kind of agree on this one, as both film and digital are not just
words, they’re the description of a whole genre.
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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At the college my wife is being told to add a double space after a full stop, which I always feel is wrong. They start fresh sentences with conjunctions as well, which I hate. Since English is not her mother tongue, she tends to take all of this as correct. Ultimately however, she has to do it their way or get marked down.
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