OK, I admit this is a huge pet peeve of mine, but there are far too many organizations out there using fake small caps in their documents. I just ran across this example while staying at an upscale Disney resort hotel:
Scribner—a book publisher—regularly uses fake small caps in their title pages. The United Nations also has it in the tag line of their 2016 annual report. My mom’s former employer, Wayne State University. And even The President of the United States. These are big orgs; They should be able to afford a properly trained graphic designer.
These days there’s no reason why you can’t use proper small caps in your work. You can download free fonts that were designed for small caps. There are also several fonts that are probably already on your computer—including the Microsoft ClearType fonts that ship with Windows and Microsoft Office (Corbel, Constantia, Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Meiryo), the fantastic and free Source Sans Pro, Avenir Next (built into macOS and iOS), Proxima Nova, Palatino Linotype, Georgia Pro, Verdana Pro, and my favorite, Hightower Text:
Can you see the difference? The stroke width of both the large and small letters is the same. In the top example, the larger letters look bold compared to the smaller ones, because they have been simply scaled up in both width and height. You can also see that the kerning is off; this is especially noticeable between the H and O in House. (More details here.)
If you are working on a Mac in Pages, you can bring up the Fonts panel with Cmd T, click on the gear icon and choose Typography… Fonts that support it will have a section in the Typography panel called Lower Case or Small Caps.
great post; it helped me. thanks for sharing it.
Posted by: khan | February 20, 2020 at 03:48 AM