Capitalization of technical terms

Feedback & Problem Solving
#1

Hi folks!

I’m trying to understand best practices for capitalization in UI design relating to technical terminology.

My impression from a search is that only trademarks, products, and those sorts of things get proper noun status. As such, I suspect that unique - but not trademarked - technical innovations should not be capitalized differently than other UI elements of that type (eg: in a form field).

I strongly suspect that this varies wildly, since companies that have technical innovations always want them to stand out. This often happens through capitalization (or quotes, or underlines…).

Thoughts?

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#2

Interesting question! hat kind of terms are you referring to? Can you give an example?

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#3

Hmm. So, I cannot use the example in question both for NDA and for no one is likely to know what it is reasons.

Let me think. Ok, suppose someone has made a technical breakthrough in, say, the speed that an IoT device speaks to its master device. I don’t know if it’s patented (although it perhaps should be!), and they’ve named it something like fast device communication, and refer to it as FDC (ok, unfortunate acronym since that one exists, but you get the point).

When it’s FDC - the acronym - I would expect all caps because acronym. But when it’s fast device communication, they want to also use Fast Device Communication, even though it basically just describes what it does. Would that be a proper noun in need of title caps?

Does this help?

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#4

Got it. I always capitalise in that case, but that doesn’t necessarily make it best practice! I do it because it makes the term stand out as ‘a thing’ rather than just a description.

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#5

I think this is what most people do, so I guess it’s de facto best practice!

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