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I am wondering if we should use Title Case or Sentence case for buttons and headings and the web?

Title Case:

    enter image description here

Sentence Case:

    enter image description here

In Yahoo's UI guidelines I couldn't find any specific recommendation except for 'choose your style and be consistent'.

Is that all? Or are there any other (additional) recommendations. Like for specific use cases or apps where the one style would be preferred over the other?

Edit: The question refers primarily to English, but differences in other languages are also good to know.

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Is it a desktop application? If so, which platform? – Bart Gijssens Oct 25 '12 at 11:07
Related/possible duplicate: ux.stackexchange.com/questions/28172/… – Ben Brocka♦ Oct 25 '12 at 12:06
@BartGijssens Question is related to web sites/apps – greenforest Oct 25 '12 at 12:22
There are specific guidelines for Windows/Mac OS/... but as far as know there are no guidelines for webapps for this. That instantly makes it an excellent question. – Bart Gijssens Oct 25 '12 at 13:04
You might want to post the question also in [english.stackexchange.com/](english.stackexchange.com/) – Juan Lanus Oct 25 '12 at 13:33
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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

I prefer 'Sentence case' over 'Title Case' because sentence case respects the difference between proper nouns and the other words.
I always thought that it was customary in English.
In Spanish it is not, we use sentence case, like this traditional argentine newspaper does.
This traditional USA newspaper uses Title Case instead.
These are language differences. For the Spanish for Spanish is not capitalized, same as the weekdays and month names.
US English is more capitalization-prone than Spanish.
UK newspapers use sentence case.
I suspect that Title Case propagates in Spanish pages because it's easier to write and bacause of the influence of the USA sites.

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Good point on language differences, thanks! I updated the question a bit. – greenforest Oct 25 '12 at 13:36
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Another example is German. German capitalizes all nouns: german.about.com/library/weekly/aa020919a.htm If you use Title Case to a speaker of German, they have to figure out which words are nouns. So in short, I'd just say it depends on the audience. – David Oct 25 '12 at 15:19
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+1 captions and labels are hardly ever titles. And title case is not even a standard for actual titles. I believe (but I may be wrong) that it is mostly American English that uses title case for titles and many other languages (including other English's) don't. – Marjan Venema Oct 25 '12 at 18:18
up vote 2 down vote

It depends what you want to achieve. There is some evidence to show that the use of capital letters slows the ability for people to scan content – it breaks the flow. So if you want users to READ and not SCAN the buttons or the titles you should use "Title Case"

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Maybe. Or maybe the capitals impair readability. – Jimmy Breck-McKye Oct 25 '12 at 12:28
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Text written in all-caps is read slower. This is because caps are more like-shaped among them than lowercases. Like for example QDOC vs. qdoc. We read by glancing mostly the upper part of the letters, which is more monotone in UCs. Also, we are more used to reading lowercase text. Anyway, the recommendation for not writing in all caps doesn't hold for headings or titles, because they are short and their impact in total reading time is negligible. Let alone a single capital per word. – Juan Lanus Oct 25 '12 at 13:04
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I know that ALL CAPS are hard to read. I know that it will impair readability! My point is, how long would you like your user to look at the title/button? If you want it to scan as fast as possible you should use "Sentence case" but of you want to slow the user down then you should use "Title Case" – Igor-G Oct 25 '12 at 14:54
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This is a good point, but I think there are much better ways to increase the probability that your users will 'read' instead of 'scan' text, e.g. make the font color red, larger, etc. – Kenny Evitt Oct 29 '12 at 19:31
@Kenny Evitt: That's true, though wouldn't use Red for buttons, would use it for warning text only. – Igor-G Oct 30 '12 at 9:45
up vote 1 down vote

With regards to buttons, if you use all-caps, then it allows for perfect vertical centering of the text within the button. No need to worry about ascenders / descenders. However, if your text is longer then 2-3 words it can be difficult to read. This is where sentence-case works well.

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