Lyla Sulaiman
Nov 6 · 5 min read

the case for lowercase

i do not use uppercase in my daily communication. i don’t write sentences with sentence case, just lowercase. just like how you see it here. i have not used uppercase in my daily communication for longer than half of my life. someone might have called me an ‘unlearned’ woman once. i did not take any offense on that. i don’t do this out of fad or trying to be different for the sake of being different. education and learning definitely had influenced me in my decision.

in the early 1920’s germany, a multifaceted austrian-hungarian artist, writer, design educator lászló moholy-nagy decided on a radical movement of abandoning uppercase at the bauhaus. bauhaus is a legendary design school in weimar, germany that started in 1919. this was not only unorthodox in the context he was in, but also controversial. all nouns in german language are capitalized. bauhaus school of thought has always been about simplicity and accessibility. however, i see this movement so much more than just for that, it was an elegant form of subversion against the authority — and at that time, the nazi. bauhaus school’s letterhead read as such: “we write everything in small letters, as we save time.” also, he reasoned, “why two alphabets, if one achieves the same? why capitalize, if we don’t speak big?”

bauhaus newsletter with no uppercase

fast forward to the early 2000’s, when i just started my formative design education, there were a lot of new movements in design. brand was the buzz word. suddenly, companies cared so much about the message they sent across to the public, how they look, how they were perceived. now, brand was beyond just a logo. it’s a vision, an aspiration.

in the spirit of the new millennium, companies also looked for a fresh change. corporations also started to realize that hierarchical, authoritative, top down management were no longer chic. humble, modest look was in — old school, prim and proper were out. moving from uppercase to lowercase for their corporate identity seemed to be a sensible idea. lowercase exudes young, informal, casual.

BP to bp
british petroleum knew early on, that the business of oil and gas was no longer sexy. so, they changed their trajectory to ‘beyond petroleum’. bp ceo engaged a branding company landor to reposition their messaging. they adopted an iconic helios mark, ditched the old-school looking uppercase BP on an emblem to a simple humble lowercase bp — it was a radical change.

we all figured this $200 million branding exercise was just another greenwashing. bp catastrophic oil spill happened only a mere 10 years after its rebranding.

the PR effort to restore its brand image costed them another $500 million, and more than $20 billion in settlements, clean up and pay out. 11 people died. what was left for bp was the humbling fact that they can’t reinvent their business dna as an oil extractor just by switching from BP to bp.

CITIBANK to citi
in 1998 citicorp had a historical merger with the traveler’s group. citicorp, the bigger stakeholder, asked paula scher, a celebrated american graphic designer, a partner of pentagram — an award-winning design firm, to design their new logo. in her book, scher mentioned she drew the citi logo with a red arch on top crossing over the two i’s on a napkin, in a few seconds.

“i drew the citi logo after we had the first meeting on a napkin. they had to merge travelers in the citi. travelers have umbrellas, and citi is a word. the lower case t is an umbrella. you stick an arch on the top and you got it.”

scher mentioned later on it was not a few second job in the end, they had to go through the ordeal of numerous bureaucratic meetings, making motion graphics on the logo, a lot of permutations — rather a paradox considering the design solution was very simple.

the internet
i grew up with the start of the dot coms. my first web design course was html. html is not letter case sensitive — HTML, html, Html, or hTmL; it does not matter how it is written. why do we need the shift button if they all still read the same; economy of writing.

also in the digital era that we live in today, there’s so much information being sent and received every day. if we read about 20 minutes daily, we’re exposed to roughly about 5000 words. given we work 8 hours a day, not to count reading books and news outside office hours, we’re exposed to about 120,000 words per day — not to mention we read street names, store signs, atm machine interface. there is so much mental energy spent on consuming information by reading letters alone. when we race against limited time and space, do we really need 2 different sizes of letters when they read and mean the same.

all alphabets are named the same whether it’s ABC or abc. they sound the same, they have the same pronunciation, they are sorted the same in alphabetical order. A still reads as A or a, all have the same meaning, same sound, constructs the same exact syntax to form the same meaning. why do we need the uppercase? why does A gets more importance just because it is ahead of the game being on the first in a sentence than a? all letters are created equal. lowercase seems to be a much more sensible choice in between the two sizes; small is beautiful.

of course i am not a purist when it comes to uppercase and lowercase. when i write business proposals or emails to clients, i still bother to write with such formality. at least i am still obliged to write clients’ names in upper and lowercases — as a form of respect. however, i genuinely believe there needs to be more attention placed in the content of a writing, as opposed to the formality of writing in big and small letters. after all, gems usually hide in the smallest characters.

(lyla is 154cm tall and has a love and hate relationships with live concerts because she usually can’t see the musicians).

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