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Typography · Typographic treatment

All caps

Capitals for monumentality, order or shouting.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?

styles make it: 167
as a defining choice: 30
as a usual one: 99
now and then: 38
avoid it: 2

Styles defined by it 30

For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.

Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards1639–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central EuropeThe standard pattern of French tarot cards, descended from Milanese tarot and recut by card-makers in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille from the 17th century.
Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth)1886–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaPrinted cotton wraps worn by women of the Swahili coast and its hinterland since the late nineteenth century, bought in pairs.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)1887–present · Latin America & Caribbean, North AmericaThe picture deck of Mexico's lotería, a bingo-like game of chance.
Hungarian Revolutionary Poster1912–1919 · Central EuropeThe political posters of Hungary's revolutions.
Vorticism & BLAST Typography1914–1920 · Western EuropeLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography1918–1932 · Western EuropeThe graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics1921–1927 · Latin America & CaribbeanMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Italian Fascist Graphics (Romanità & Exhibition Photomontage)1921–1943 · Southern EuropeThe visual language of Italian Fascism, which turned modernist means to a cult of Rome and of the Duce.
Amazonian Boat Lettering (Abridores de Letras)1925–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe painted boat names of Pará's rivers in the Brazilian Amazon, made for about a century by self-taught riverside painters (abridores de letras).
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era)1929–1959 · OceaniaThe pictorial posters that the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA, 1929), state tourist bureaux, railways and shipping lines commissioned to sell Australia abroad and at home.
Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli)1929–present · Southern EuropeThe cover system of Mondadori's crime series, Milan, from I Libri Gialli of 1929 to Il Giallo Mondadori today.
American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age)1934–1993 · North AmericaThe American newsstand comic book from Famous Funnies (1934) and Action Comics #1 (1938) through the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages, and past the Bronze Age's end in 1985 until computer colour replaced hand separations in the early 1990s.
Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia)1948–1996 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe adult adventure comics of Buenos Aires newsstand magazines, from Misterix (1948) and Oesterheld's Hora Cero (1957) to Skorpio and Fierro; the humour line of Patoruzú, Rico Tipo and Mafalda is another tradition.
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics)1948–present · Southern EuropeThe house format of Milan's Bonelli publishing house and its imitators (Tex, Zagor, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never): monthly newsstand paperbacks of 16 x 21 cm with about a hundred black-and-white pages, each a long episode of a serial hero.
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism1951–1965 · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe picture magazine of Black urban Africa in the 1950s.
Amar Chitra Katha Comics1967–present · South AsiaThe Bombay comic-book series that from 1967 retold Hindu myth and epic, Buddhist and Jain tales, saints, folk legends, the jests of the court wits Birbal and Tenali Raman, and Indian history for children, in English and Indian languages, with well over 500 titles by the early 1990s.
Black Panther Party Graphics1967–1980 · North AmericaThe visual language of the Black Panther Party, created largely by its Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, for the weekly newspaper The Black Panther.
Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)1968–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & North Africa, Southeast Asia, North AmericaThe graphic language of Italy's organised football supporters, the ultras, from the late 1960s, and of the groups that copied them across Europe, North Africa and beyond.
Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters)1969–1975 · Latin America & CaribbeanPosters for the Peruvian military government's agrarian reform, made in Lima from 1969 by Jesús Ruiz Durand and colleagues at the state's reform publicity office.
Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)1972–2025 · Middle East & North AfricaIstanbul's weekly cartoon magazines, from the Aral brothers' Gırgır (1972), which sold up to about half a million copies, through the chain of breakaways that followed it: Limon, LeMan, Penguen and Uykusuz.
South African Resistance Poster1978–1994 · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe posters of the struggle against apartheid, from the exiled Medu Art Ensemble in Gaborone to the community workshops that served the United Democratic Front and the unions in the 1980s.
ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics1987–1995 · North AmericaThe graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'.
Bitterkomix (Afrikaans Underground Comics)1992–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe Afrikaans underground comics magazine founded in Stellenbosch in 1992 by Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog) and Conrad Botes (Konradski), with Mark Kannemeyer (Lorcan White).
Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular2003–present · Global / networked, North AmericaA deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
Hipster Artisanal Revival2007–2018 · North America, Global / networkedThe trade-mark look of the 2007–2018 craft boom, which dressed new coffee roasters, breweries and stationers as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century firms.
Analog Horror Graphics2015–present · North America, Global / networkedA horror genre, mostly on YouTube, that tells its stories through imitation television and home-video graphics rather than actors: emergency-alert screens, station IDs, public-service, educational and instructional tapes, set between the 1960s and early 2000s.
Front-of-Pack Warning Octagons (Latin American Food Warning Seals)2016–present · Latin America & CaribbeanA state warning system stacked on commercial food packs.
Extinction Rebellion Graphics2018–present · Western Europe, Global / networkedThe visual identity of Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement founded in Stroud in 2018, built by its volunteer Art Group as a free kit anyone may print.
Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover)2019–2023 · North AmericaThe default jacket of US literary fiction around 2019–2023: soft, overlapping blobs of saturated colour fill the cover edge to edge (cobalt, pink, orange-red, deep green, mustard).
Black Lives Matter Street Murals2020–present · North AmericaA single protest slogan painted along the roadway in capitals 20 to 35 feet tall, filling the street from kerb to kerb, so it reads whole only from rooftops, drones and helicopters.

Styles that often use it 99

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Styles that use it now and then 38

An occasional choice in these styles.

It often goes with

Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.

Naturalistic depictionin 89 of 167
Condensed displayin 53 of 167
Agitational & persuasivein 78 of 167
Single focal pointin 128 of 167
Ornamented displayin 65 of 167
Full bleedin 75 of 167

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in typography