It depends.

Lacking context, I would say the bottom one. If you want it to look a bit traditional/old-fashioned, the middle one. If you want the acronym to stand out, the top one (with the middle one doing this more than the bottom one).

hhp

Paul, are you sure that you're actually using the small cap characters, accessed through the OpenType palette, in Gotham Narrow? The top example is what I would expect to see when the application scales the glyphs in a face that doesn't have true small caps included.

As far as I know, neither width of Gotham comes with small caps, so what paultype seems to be trying is to emulate the look of true small caps by using scaled full caps. I think this does not work at all. In all three cases, the artificial small caps look too narrow and I doubt that this can be remedied by stretching them. If it is just one or two words at a fairly small size, go for the third option.

If a font does not include small caps, scaled-down full caps are what InDesign or Illustrator give you without even showing a warning. They expect you to notice yourself—and in 9 out of 10 cases you really should. As a Gotham alternative with small caps, Proxima Nova might be worth a try.

I would say they are also a bit too small. If they're fake, you can change the general scaling used in the "typography" (if that's the name) pallet, but I usually set up a character style, and give a different percentage to height and width. So far, nothing you can do about the weight with InDesign -- smallest you can stroke them is .25 points, and that's usually too much.

You can also get into disagreements (watch the responses here!) about the right size. For acronyms, I like small caps to be just a touch larger than the x-height of the lower case letters. They should stick out without calling attention to themselves. Yeah, that's a long way from giving a cookbook answer.

In your case, you're using cap-small cap, and again, I'd set them a little bigger. They don't quite balance, to my eye.

One problem with using a character style where horizontal-vertical scaled is applied: kerning will be broken where the scaled letters fall next to an unscaled glyph -- if you set "RCA's" and apply scaling to RCA but not the following apostrophe, the automatic kerning with the A and the apostrophe will be lost. Have to do it by hand, with each occurrence.

I use this trick with true-cut small caps if they're not to my taste as well. You can't go very far before you mess up the weight enough to look bad, though. Maybe a 5% to 7% change is all that won't show -- depends on the font.

BTW, I've used Thomas Phinney's Hypatia Sans where others might use Gotham. I know they're a bit different. I usually prefer Hypatia Sans. Which, BTW, has small caps. No condensed, though.

Ah, thanks.

We still use CS4. Tried to go to 5.5, but it had a bug that made it not useable with our workflow. Don't ask, it will just get into a litany of InDesign bugs. That particular one's gone in CS6, but we've not completely wrung 6 out yet. Anyway. something to look forward to. Another example of something you can do in either a font editing program or a layout program, unless the silly font license requires you to do it in the layout program...as with all H&FJ fonts...

Thanks again.