A capital idea?

By Michele Witthaus

In recent years, the trend towards the individualisation of company names has shown no sign of abating.

Full and partial capitalisation or lower-casing of company names, or tortuous combinations of both, have come to epitomise an individualistic approach to corporate identity that promises a short cut to noticeability. By being awkward or inconvenient to write down, a company name does indeed become more memorable. As with documents like annual reports and corporate brochures printed in formats that just won’t fit into the file box or onto the bookshelf, people may well spend more time looking at and thinking about the materials in question, but to what end? Does the firm that poses this kind of classification, presentation or storage issue benefit from more relevant enquiries or buying decisions?

When working with a client to plan a new logo or corporate identity, we encourage careful consideration of why they might want to introduce – or continue to use – odd capitalisations. There are practical issues around this decision, from the typographical challenges around starting sentences in print with lower case letters (frequently leading to editorial decisions to avoid using the company name to start a sentence, for example, and the subsequent reduced incidence of the name in media reports) to the possibility that online search might be jeopardised as users might find the name hard to recall. For the above reasons, we take a standardised approach to the writing of proper names, capitalising the first letter only. But this is not to say that we aren’t frequently challenged to look again at why we do this – or to consider alternatives. We welcome debate and are happy to advise on the pros and cons of all facets of corporate identity.

Michele Witthaus is a writer at Tudor Rose. To receive articles like this directly to your inbox, please sign up for our newsletter