Should I use capital letters (titlecase) when using small caps?

Question

I just came to realize this problem with chapter titles in my thesis.

I'm using small caps for them, but I also noticed that (because I'm use to it) I wrote them in titlecase, e.g.:

However, if I use a long chapter title, I'm not so sure if it looks ok...

Since I'm not a graphic designer, nor my aesthetics are very good (go figure, I'm a scientist) I would like your help on what should I do:

1. Go completely with lower case
2. Use titlecase
3. Use upper case for all of them
4. Use Capital letter on the first word of the title

Answer 1

The short answer is that it is a matter of taste.

The longer answer is that "small caps" were developed for use within running text so that "all capitals," when you stand back and squint, have a similar texture and color to the regular surrounding text. This was typically a hand-crafted font and not just a smaller point size.

From that perspective, "small caps" is not intended to be mixed with "regular caps." And if you subscribe to such things, then this is the only correct thing to do. Then again, it used to be a thing to wear stockings and powdered wigs.

However, it is obviously a common thing to mix small caps with regular caps for stylistic reasons, so why not?

Personally I have used them in the past and even done things like "Technological backgrounD," but my current taste is all caps or nothing. I think that if you are thinking about it and you think it looks "not so great," then trust your judgement and go with all caps. Use a Display Titles font if available and maybe increase the tracking (letter spacing) slightly.

If there is a departmental style guide which prescribes typesetting, you should follow it.

Answer 2

Set the titles in All Caps and make the type size a little smaller than your current small caps.

Two reasons for this:

• Title case with small caps is like using bold italics. Either bold or italic is fine on its own for emphasis, so using both is redundant.

• The particular typeface you're using doesn't have true Small Caps, so the initial cap is slightly bolder than the rest of the word (because these "small caps" are just capitals at a smaller point size). It looks ugly.

Answer 3

This is an interesting problem. I can understand that aesthetically, you might prefer to see all letters in Small-Caps, but if the word(s) need a capital for the first letter (such as a city, name of a person etc), then it must have this for future proofing the content, or delivery in some other form.

So, if, at some time, the style of the content is likely to be changed (by using normal rather than Small-Caps), then you are stuck with the whole text in lowercase.

When the content is delivered on a web site, or an eBook, the user may choose to use a different font or turn off styling from the publisher - again this may leave the text of the word set in all lowercase. You don't want to see 'new york' instead of 'New York'.