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What is the name of text stylization, where all letters are lowercase, but where "naturally" uppercase letters would occur, a lowercase letter scaled to uppercase size is used? - The opposite of smallcaps, where lowercase letters are replaced with downscaled uppercase.

(a very inopportune example is in the lower-left of the picture below; the cursive lowercase 'a' looks like something entirely different...)

enter image description here

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  • The true opposite of small caps would be "large lowercase", which none of your images show. As for the A being "lowercase", it depends fully on what the font designer chooses for the uppercase - it isn't a lowercase a scaled, though it takes a similar form – Zach Saucier Feb 13 '17 at 13:09
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The opposite of small caps is just "lowercase".

In some instances "unicase" may be appropriate if only one glyph for a character exists.

(....and for the record it's not merely "aunt" which reads poorly... "flickering" looks pretty suspicious to me as well. And "click lovers" is also pretty close to inappropriate due to the "cl" not being clearly defined.... did you search for these specifically?)

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  • It says "This is why font selection is so important" so pretty sure its from some sort of lesson or article that deliberately made all of them questionable. – Ryan♦ Feb 12 '17 at 17:48
  • I found that on /r/keming, font choice and kerning errors lead to this kind of mistakes. But that particular font wasn't -just- lowercase; it used lowercase cursive 'a' - but the size of a capital letter. – SF. Feb 12 '17 at 20:59
  • @SF. No, that's the correct letterform for a capital cursive A. The letter isn't closed; that's why it looks like a C. A lowercase a, even increased to the size of a capital, would have a trailing line in front of it — look at the a in "Special." – Lauren-Reinstate-Monica-Ipsum Feb 13 '17 at 10:29
  • @LaurenIpsum: Must be a regional variant. Around here, it's invariably similar to printed A, with sharp tip; the round shape being exclusively lowercase. – SF. Feb 13 '17 at 10:56
  • @SF. So this is not what they teach in school? 2020site.org/writing/images/cursive-upper.png – Lauren-Reinstate-Monica-Ipsum Feb 13 '17 at 12:42
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I don't think there is a typographic term for this. You're right that some characters are effectively the same as upper- and lower-case, such as C or U, while others are radically different, such as G or A.

Dig around in old books from Adrian Frutiger and there's probably a term to describe this phenotypical discordance.

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