(I don’t read German). — “Caps+lowercases” should be used for texts to be read as con­tent.
We read this mix­ture every­day for years. Empha­sis with caps in a text is per­haps too much, but a Sanserif com­pan­ion of a Serif font doesn’t work either, fake ital­ics in cer­tains case either too, very light semi­bold either too, its really depend­ing what kind of things you design. — - “Caps only” should be used for text to be seen as image.
In some cases, mon­u­men­tal signs on a build­ing, a brand, etc. Caps work better than the usual caps+lowercases. For a couple of words, caps are very good in cer­tain cases, and even can be very beau­ti­ful, they offer a very nice appare­ance on a page. Just recall Roman inscrip­tions and Bodoni titling pages…

Don’t be strictly against caps as some people use them too much. Its not pro­duc­tive. Design is more subtle than just trying to be against some prac­tises.

I don’t know that its a read­abil­ity issue, more a psy­cho­log­i­cal one, because text in all caps is uni­ver­sally inter­preted as shout­ing, rude and brash.

Google adwords is good evi­dence to sug­gest that all-​caps is the exact oppo­site of what people want to see.

Are all caps less leg­i­ble than mixed caps? Yes. Are they so illeg­i­ble that the viewer can never deci­pher the word? Def­i­nitely not. I see no prob­lems in using all caps for head­lines and short sen­tences.

I’ll use all caps for short, two or three word lines from time to time. For lines longer than that, I’ll usu­ally opt for small caps.

If all caps were so hard to read (as awful as a para­graph is made to look with them), I’d think that busi­ness people igno­rant of our dis­taste for it wouldn’t use them. It seems like a highly con­tex­tual thing to argue about.

I wouldn’t want to hand­i­cap myself by jet­ti­son­ing caps as mag­a­zine cov­er­lines, for instance. Long live caps. Even big stacked wadges of caps look ok if done prop­erly.

I agree. ALL CAPS has its place in the world of design, but the designer needs to be aware of proper kern­ing, lead­ing and type­face selec­tion.

With­out get­ting too heady, all caps type is harder to read gen­er­ally in para­graphs, because the eye uses the upper lower case forms to enhance read­abil­ity. The upper low­er­case type informs where a sen­tence starts, dif­fer­en­ti­ates better between cer­tain char­ac­ters like O’s and Q’s (o q).

Obvi­ously, some ulc fonts do a poor job of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion such as Avant Garde and Lubalin where the o, a, c, d, p, b, q, g, are hard to dis­tin­guish at book-​weight sizes.

I remem­ber my teacher at the art acad­emy being in love with long blocks of caps, very care­fully spaced. And though I agree that the leg­i­bil­ity dimin­ishes, I would hes­i­tate to ban it from my typo­graphic tool­box. As Ricky Irvine said, it all depends on con­text.

I feel that CAPS is one of the colors in our pal­lette.
You can use them to shout, as men­tioned above. But spaced widely or using a very light or even thin letter it says some­thing else.

As with all, don’t overdo it and never use it with­out a good reason.

Per­son­aly I use it as an image. It stacks better than low­er­casts. But it becomes even more dif­fi­cult to read then.

Personaly I use it as an image.

Exactly, that’s what I usu­ally do — I don’t really like the shout­ing aspect of it. The char­ac­ters become build­ing blocks, and you can do stuff you simply can’t with low­er­case. My take on it is — like I explained in my last episode of My Type of Music — that you simply have to coun­ter­bal­ance the neg­a­tives with the pos­i­tives by only using them for shorter bursts of text, and care­fully size and space them.

STUDY AFTER STUDY HAS SHOWN THAT IT IS MUCH MORE DIF­FI­CULT TO READ TEXT IN ALL CAPS THAN IT IS IN UPPER AND LOW­ER­CASE LET­TERS. WE LOOK AT AND READ WORDS BY THEIR LET­TERS BUT ALSO BY THE SHAPES OF THOSE LET­TERS IN PAT­TERNS. THESE SHAPES ARE CALLED THE “COAST­LINE” AND REFERS TO THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE DESCEN­DERS AND ASCEN­DERS OF THE LET­TERS. WHEN WORDS ARE WRIT­TEN IN ALL CAPS, THERE ARE NO UPS AND DOWNS. ALL THE SHAPES AND HEIGHTS OF THE LET­TERS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME. WHEN WORDS ARE WRIT­TEN IN ALL CAPS, WE HAVE TO READ THE WORDS LETTER BY LETTER WHICH REALLY SLOWS US DOWN. READ THIS PARA­GRAPH IN ALL CAPS TO SEE HOW MUCH LONGER IT TAKES.

Suresh,

I have heard about “study after study” address­ing this leg­i­bil­ity ques­tion (which i agree with) — but i have never seen an actual study. Could you pro­vide such a reference(s)? Thanks very much.

Yes, there has been read­abil­ity research done on this:

http://​lau​ren​scharff.​com/​c​o​u​r​s​e​i​n​f​o​/​S​L​0​3​/​e​m​a​i​l​_​s​t​u​d​y.htm

“Chi Square analy­ses indi­cated read­ers liked text writ­ten in all upper case let­ters sig­nif­i­cantly less than the other for­mats, and that it was harder to find impor­tant infor­ma­tion when using all cap­i­tal let­ters… while the use of all cap­i­tal let­ters does not sig­nif­i­cantly affect accu­racy or read­ing times, it may affect read­ers’ like­li­hood to read…”

(Empha­sis mine)

Suresh,

These stud­ies con­vince me read­ing speed is defined by how a person learns to read. JUST GROW UP IN AN ALL CAPS WORLD.