Typography plays a critical role in any design; in fact, it accounts for as much as 95% of everything we see on the Web. When done well, it adds personality to content, becomes its voice. When established poorly, typographic elements become unreadable, thus reducing the impact a given piece of content will have on the reader.
In some cases, it will lead to problems with processing text, and thus increasing cognitive load on the user. The bigger the congnitive load is, the harder it is for users to complete their tasks.
WFP editorial style guide
All editorial guidelines can be found in this guide
This is an adaptation to user interfaces of the Capitalization section of the WFP Editorial Style Guide and capitalization guidelines for WFPgo (intranet link). GOV.UK provides useful guidance on how to write for the user in plain English.
Capitalization is appropriate in titles of documents, publications, and for proper nouns.
The labels and terms we use on user interfaces are neither proper nouns nor titles most of the time.
Capitalization makes the text harder to scan and read, while sentence case is easier on the eye.
People tend to over-capitalize when writing in sentences, whereas navigation labels , column and row headers, input fields in forms,
action verbs on buttons are sentences made of common nouns that should be easy to recognize and act upon.
They work as instructions and pointers and as such must not be capitalized. This can be Distracting and Make Reading harder (compare with, this can be distracting and make reading harder).
On user interfaces, we prefer sentence case, i.e. we capitalize the first word of the label, then use lower case except for proper nouns (e.g View document vs View Country Strategic Plan) and words derived from proper nouns (e.g. Italian as the adjective derived from Italy).
Do not capitalize these UI elements:
Input field labels in forms and column headers:
the density of text labels and column headers would make the interface less usable if they were to be treated as proper nouns or titles.
The same labels are used often as field labels and column headers and capitalizing them in tables and not in the forms would make the interface very inconsistent.
Navigation labels: e.g. Commodity prices, Shipping rates, Imp/Exp restrictions.
Controlled lists in drop-down menus: avoid as much as possible when creating a controlled vocabulary that will be displayed in a drop-down menu. If the list is originated from an external data source, try removing capitalization with frontend tools
Section headings : e.g. Main documents; Technical reviews.
Titles of charts in dashboards : apply the same rules for titles and headings: use sentence case and capitalize only proper nouns. e.g. implementation plan; resource-based plan; management plan. Chart titles refer to the content of the plans and CO submissions, not to document titles,
Refer to Word Index in the Editorial Style Guide. Then look here:
Use sentence case (no capitals)
These are common names, unless used in a title of a publication or a programme , I.e. part of proper noun or title.
management plan
implementation plan
needs-based plan
resource-based plan
assignment plan
line of sight
smallholder farmers
cash-based transfer
country director (Country Director of X)
country office (not “CO”)
country operation management plan
country portfolio budget
country strategic plans
country strategic review
Use title case (capitalize)
Strategic Goal
Strategic Objective
Strategic Result
Strategic Outcome
Management Plan (when referred to the title of the EB document, not the abstract content of the management plan)
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