How to write a good intro title, and what all caps ruins

This is the single most common thing I have to talk customers out of, and every one of them agrees once they see it side by side. The title comes in typed entirely in capitals, usually because capitals feel bigger and more official, and the style they've picked is the Disney script.

So here's my answer to how to write a good intro title: keep it short and have it name the thing and nothing else, then type it in the case the lettering was drawn for. With a Disney-style script that's ordinary mixed case, a capital at the start of each name and lowercase after it, because all caps pulls the script apart.

Two capitals and a lot of guessing

The famous Disney wordmark only ever gave anyone two capitals to copy: the W of "Walt" and the D of "Disney". Everything else in it is lowercase, joined up and leaning forward. Then in 2011 the company dropped "Walt" and "Pictures" from the on-screen mark (Nerdist's history of the Disney logo covers the change), which left one capital doing all the work. One D. That's the entire official capital alphabet, more or less, and I don't think most people who reach for "the Disney font" ever notice how thin that is. The font they usually mean is Waltograph, a free fan typeface Justin Callaghan released in 2000 under the name Walt Disney Script, built by extrapolating the logo's lettering into a full character set. So every capital A, N, S or E you type in it is somebody's educated guess at what Walt's brush might have done, and a line made of nothing but those guesses looks exactly like what it is.

I keep the Disney style in my intro catalogue, and the case of the title is honestly the first thing I'm checking when an order for it lands. Before the music, before the castle.

A capital in a script face has a job, and it's a small one. It starts the word and swings out wide before the lowercase letters take over and carry the line. A whole row of them is all starts. Some come out too tall. A couple lose their joins completely and one usually looks like it wandered in from a wedding invitation font, which is a weird thing to see in front of a castle.

What capitals do to a word

Matthew Butterick puts the typographic reason better than I can. In his notes on all caps he says capitals are harder to read than lowercase because capitalisation homogenises letter shapes into a flat rectangle. Lowercase words have a skyline, with ascenders poking up and descenders hanging down, and your eye picks up that outline almost before it reads the letters.

Kill the skyline and the word becomes a brick.

Butterick doesn't ban caps, to be fair. He says they're fine for headings shorter than a line, and then he adds the instruction that matters here: always add letterspacing to caps. I mean, fine for a label. A script can't take it, though, because every letter in a script is drawn to touch the one beside it and extra space is the one thing those joins can't survive. Open up the spacing so the capitals can breathe and the joins snap. Keep the letters tight enough to join and the capitals crash into each other. There isn't really a setting in between that works (believe me, the tracking slider has been tried in both directions).

A brick of capitals is still readable, sure. People will know what it says. But a title in an opening gets a few seconds on screen with a whole lot of motion behind it, and in that time the eye needs a place to start and a direction to travel, which the brick doesn't give it.

A brush going sideways

There's a thread on TypeDrawers asking how the Walt Disney logo was drawn, and the most useful answer comes from type designer Ray Larabie. His view is that it's based on Walt's publicity brush signature, not his everyday one (which he calls unreadable), and he points at the heavy bottoms of the L and the E as the giveaway that a brush was moving sideways when those strokes were made. Nobody in the thread knew who drew the final version. I suspect it went through years of tracing and touching up before it settled, which is roughly where Larabie lands too, though he's guessing as much as anyone.

What I take from it is that the thick parts of the lettering are records of a hand moving. Pressure builds at the bottom of a stroke and the brush drags into the next letter. A script face built from that logo expects the same thing from you, so every lowercase letter sits there waiting to be joined to the next one.

Capitals don't join.

So an all-caps Disney title keeps the colour and the curl of the lettering but throws away the travel, and the travel is kind of the point. You still recognise the reference, obviously, and nobody's going to mistake it for another studio, but it stops feeling like somebody wrote the name.

This is also where the font menu misleads people. A typeface having a capital glyph only means the software can place one. Whether that shape belongs next to the lowercase, or can hold up the first shot of an opening, is a separate question entirely, and in the fan Disney fonts the answer for most capitals is no.

A custom Disney style intro looks right when the name moves through the script the way "Disney" moves through the logo. It works with long names too, just with less room to spare.

When capitals are fine

I don't think every title should be mixed case. That would be a silly rule. A horror ident with one short word in a heavy condensed face often wants capitals, because the letters are meant to land one at a time like hits. Plenty of geometric sans titles look better in caps with generous tracking, and that's exactly the situation Butterick's rule was written for.

The trouble starts when someone picks the script because it feels like Disney and then sets it like a football club badge.

Type it the way you want to see it

Whatever case you type is the case the title gets built in. Changing it afterwards isn't a quick toggle, since the spacing and the balance of the whole line shift with it. I wrote about the wider version of this, long titles and the capitalisation people send, in what people get wrong is the text. The Disney case goes a step further because the capitals themselves are invented.

Mixed case won't rescue everything. A long name still gets cramped, and some letter pairs in the fan fonts are awkward no matter what you do with them. Oddly, initials are the worst case of all: a capital sitting right after another capital, with nothing in the original logo to show how the two should connect.

And then there are those heavy bottoms on the L and the E, still sitting in the logo after all these decades, each one the mark of a brush being dragged sideways into whatever letter came next.