CAPITAL IDEA?

Something I learned when I worked in Public Relations (and which is also a matter of common sense) is often ignored or forgotten by graphic designers - beware of capitals!

Capitals or Upper Case if you want to be snobby - or majuscules* if you want to get all technical - help us to signify new sentences, denote proper names (as opposed to improper names e.g. 'you arse!') and attach importance or emphasis. These are some of the benefits of not having a unicase language, or being German, where random capitalisation appears to occur. 

(Of course, you can also attach importance or emphasis using other devices e.g. italic, bold, underlining or size or a big red felt pen.)

Compare:

EVEN BEFORE THE USE OF CAPITALS BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH 'SHOUTING' IN EMAILS, TEXTS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS, THEY WERE BAD AND WRONG.

with:

Even before the use of capitals became synonymous with 'shouting' in emails, texts and social networks they were BAD and WRONG.

Why?

1. Because it is much more difficult to take in blocks of text that are all exactly the same height. We need those ascenders and descenders to speed up word recognition, which is done by shapes and patterns as much as anything else. UPPER CASE kills - don't believe me? Read Capital Offenders

2. Because IF YOU emphasize everything, you EMPHASISE NOTHING

I'll finish with a little ditty from Roger McGough:

ONCE I LIVED MY LIFE IN CAPITALS
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
but now I'm sadly lower case
with the occasional italic

* The lower case letters are called miniscules even when they're not as small as this

Related posts: 10 Punctuation Pet Hates    and     Freeze! It's the Grammar Police

The Time of the Signs

Ah to be in PR again, now that the election season's here! PR spindoctors may look down on poets as nerdy word-smiths, and poets may believe publicists to be soul-less pollsters, but the two are more alike than they think. I know - I've been both. 

For both the challenge is to cram your entire, often complex message into a sound-bite - a few words that will capture your thoughts like a perfectly-preserved creature in amber. (Oops, sorry - the poet slipped out there.)  

Political slogans and speeches sometimes  slip into the poetic. Dogberry has already gone into the whole 'Repetition, repetition, repetition' thing. (He didn't call it a 'thing' - he had a proper name for it. We (ex)PR types don't go in for the proper names of things - we never need to know.) The occasional revisiting of key phrases in speeches remind me of performance poetry. Obama could have won a slam with his 'Yes we can!'

But who wants to listen to an impassioned speech when they only have the attention span of a Hallmark card? This election campaign has resorted to the sound-bite, and, more than ever, the sight-bite. (Ooh - did I just make up a  new word? I love it when that happens!*) And thanks to the plethora of image-ma

*Alas no, sight bite is already at large, though generally used for video clips.king and info-sharing software it's been a creative campaign on the poster front.

It's already too late to see mydavidcameron.com  - an independent website which took 'that' Cameron poster

and made a template available for anyone with basic IT skills to play with. 250,000 people visited. I only just found out, but the site has closed. More about it here.  

It'll all be over by the time you read this, but here are a couple of the rallies of this poster war:!. 

Here's the original Labour poster comparing Tory leaders to X-factor's dodgy pop duo Jedwood. 

And here's the Tory response.

It works the other way. Labour's attempts to allude to the dark Thatcherite 1980's by using imagery from Ashes to Ashes back-fired dramatically when they managed to achieve the impossible: The made David Cameron look sexy. 

They had reckoned without the 'Gene Hunt effect.' The Tories practically reproduced the same poster (with a little more airbrushing perchance?).

There are more of these on the Guardian website and more about that Ashes to Ashes flip at The Times.

I've gone on long enough, much like the election night.

Let's finish with my favourite, which simply takes the much-discussed ambiguity of Labour's 'A Future Fair For All' campaign slogan and does what we all would have done with it. I would never have come up with or agreed to a slogan like that. It was ripe for plundering.

Another post about posters: Discovering de-motivational posters