Design thread .... v.2

Yeah Doc, Ryan is right. I do hammer heds for centerpieces every now and then and I've got nothing against it, but the thing I was talking about was the practice of capitalizing the first letter of each word. I can't think of too many papers that do it, but it drives me crazy.

 

Ah. Gotcha.

 

That's our awesome up-style paper. It's crap.

 

That font with just the first letters capitalized is crap.

 

OK. I have 20 minutes in between poker tournaments, so I'm about to wax poetic on ALL CAPS headlines.

My advice: Hold the technique to the same editing standards you would a photo edit, or for that matter, stories or any content.

That standard is: Do I really need an ALL CAPS headline? ... Put another way, what does ALL CAPS add to the content on this page?

Accept this statement as fact, for the purposes of this post: People are used to reading standard case. That's what your eye defaults to. Therefore, it should follow that most of what we put in our paper should be standard case, in the name of making things easiest on readers.

But not always. There are some exceptions, when ALL CAPS could be a good choice:

1. When you want to hit your readers over the head with something. This is the most common:

http://www.newspagedesigner.com/users/5667/SP0110411.jpg

Make that headline standard case, and you may end up taking up a quarter of the page, and you'll have a LOT of white space above the lowercase letters.

Most people understand that one. But there's another time when I say you need to consider ALL CAPS:

2. When you want to direct attention AWAY from the headline.

Follow me here: There is less contrast in an ALL CAPS headline. The lack of descenders and white space can make a headline blend into a package, too.

For example: http://www.newspagedesigner.com/users/2685/AIDS.1only.jpg

The person who designed this page did NOT want you to take your eyes off that photo, so he did not do one thing on the rest of the page that gave you a reason to, including the headline treatment.

The ALL CAPS gives the headline one shape -- a wide rectangle, which reflects the edges of a photo frame. If it's standard case, then you're going to have extra white space above and below the letters -- around the ascenders and descenders. And your eye will naturally gravitate toward it.

The person who designed this page made the headline all caps with a purpose, a content-driven purpose. The lack of contrast in the headline was meant to let an eye spend an extra half-second with the image.

I'm not saying these are endall reasons. Nor am I necessarily advocating spending hours sweating font case. But I am saying if you are into details, you should look for content-based reasons for even the smallest of them, such as whether to click that all caps option or not.

-- Josh Crutchmer, sportsdesigner.com

 

Over the last eight months or so, I've asked myself, "Is there a purpose for doing it this way, or am I just doing it just to do it?" a lot more often. It's getting to the point where I ask myself that question on a daily basis.

Josh brings some very interesting points to the table about the ALL CAPS issue. I'll think twice before I do it again, although I currently do it once every other week or so.

 

I do all caps very sparingly. I'm more likely to use hedes with small caps.

To me, if you use all caps frequently, they lose impact. If you use them rarely, it calls more attention to something.

 

use all caps impact. that should do the trick.

 

Har, har, har. Solid, noob. You're hired. Hyuk, hyuk.

Tom: Fetch a design book while you're getting yourself that beer. Try not to stumble over an intelligent thought whilst you eke your way through these discussions, urinating freely along the way.

 

take a keen interest in design, fucktard?

 

No, just a design-based approach.

(Isn't he adorable?)

 

well, it appears yawn's hillbilly cousin has taken an interest in design. the beautiful thing about it is the person admittedly has a big, fat fleshy tongue ... all the better to pleasure us with, i guess.