Q. I work at an ad agency, and I’m the only writer/editor/proofreader on staff. A recent title bothered our creative director because only one word in it was not capitalized (unbalanced from a design perspective, I guess): Why Full-Service Advertising Is More Important than Ever. My question is, first of all, am I correct that the word “than” should be lowercased in the above title? And second, what’s your opinion on making capitalization decisions on ad copy based on how things look? I’m willing to fudge the rules a bit for great design, but I’m not willing to throw the rules out the window altogether.
A. Advertising design, as opposed to, say, bibliography writing, is all about breaking the rules. But here, rules and advertising are in harmony. Not only should “than” (a conjunction) be capitalized in a title, but your creative director is right—it looks weird lowercased.