From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

17 Avoid all caps and underlined text

17 Avoid all caps and underlined text

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

17 Avoid all caps and underlined text

“

- Law 17, avoid all caps and underlined text. On a typewriter, there are really two ways to emphasize text and help call attention to it. All caps and underlines. That's fine if you're using a typewriter but if you're not, and you're probably not, it's time to abandon those bad habits and learn better ways, more modern ways to emphasize text. In body text, text set in all caps is very clunky and very heavy on the page. All caps letters look huge and they overwhelm the text that surrounds them. If you're going to use all caps, limit their use to titles and sub-heads in text-heavy documents. This will ensure that they're used sparingly. For other documents like posters or invitations and business cards, it can be easier to incorporate text in all caps without it being so visually disruptive. Underlines are a typewriter convention that told typesetters to set the underlined text in italics. Professionally typeset documents do not use underlines. If you want to add horizontal lines to…

Contents