text - All capital titles: good or bad?

What is the recommended use for all capitals titles? For example: THIS IS A TITLE.

The website http://camvine.com/ has all capital titles, e.g. MARKET SECTORS.

Good, bad?

Answer

It depends on how you are using it.

All caps can be the perfect choice when used correctly. The site you have referenced does look slightly odd to me, this could be because of the typeface itself. Certain typefaces such as Trajan Pro and Bebas consist of only all caps characters. These types of typefaces are usually used very successfully in headers and titles. The main issue here in your example is the current type being uses is not as suitable as others for all caps. A designer should be able to help you with this in your interface. They should be able to know the right way to pull it off and make it look professional.

Anyone use Photoshop CS4 or CS5? All of the predefined workspaces and windows use all caps and it works well here. It is used to help distinguish these elements from their content, which is in normal casing:

Update Visual Studio 2012 is using all caps to help distinguish the menu from the rest of the content.

Another example would be with movie posters. A majority of them use all caps titles very successfully. Google image search movie titles to see a good display of this. Book and magazine covers in at least half of the cases use all caps for titles. Again, I am not advocating to use it for plain text, but for titles and words or short phrases it can work out great.

Newspapers often us all caps for their titles:

Book covers (UX relevant):

The navigation of LukeW's site and the cover of one of his books:

Another resource from Typography for Lawyers states:

"All-caps text — mean­ing text with all the let­ters cap­i­tal­ized — is best used spar­ingly. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use caps. Just use them judi­ciously. Caps are suit­able for head­ings shorter than one line (e.g., “Table of Author­i­ties”), head­ers, foot­ers, cap­tions, or other labels. Caps work at small point sizes. Caps work well on let­ter­head and busi­ness cards. Always add let­ter-spac­ing to caps to make them eas­ier to read, and make sure kern­ing is turned on."