How to Do Small Caps in Illustrator

In the following tutorial, you'll learn how to do small caps in Adobe Illustrator and how you can scale them.

We'll use the Knicknack font from Envato Elements to better exemplify small caps in Illustrator and learn how to do small caps in Illustrator.

If you're interested in learning more about working with fonts in Illustrator, check out these resources as well:

What You'll Learn in This Small Caps Illustrator Tutorial

What are small caps?
How to capitalize text in Illustrator
How to do small caps in Illustrator

What Are Small Caps?

Small caps are lowercase characters that resemble uppercase letters but reduced in size, close to the size of lowercase letters.

How to Do Small Caps in Illustrator

To add small caps in Illustrator, you need to go to the Character panel.

You can either go to Window > Type > Character or you can use the Control-T keyboard shortcut to open this panel. Open the fly-out menu of this panel and go to Show Options to get access to the extra settings. This includes the Small Caps button and some other commands that can be used to capitalize text in Illustrator.

Now, make sure that your text is selected and just click the Small Caps buttons to easily turn the lower case letters into small caps in Illustrator. Additionally, you can deselect your text and enable the Small Caps buttons if you want to make sure that any new text which you create uses small caps instead of lowercase letters.

The Character panel can also be accessed via the control panel. Make sure that your text is selected, focus on the control panel, and click the underlined "Character" text, which will open the Character fly-out panel.

Alternatively, you can open the fly-out menu from the Character panel and go to Small Caps to add small caps in Illustrator.

How to Resize Small Caps in Illustrator

If your font doesn't come with specifically designed small-cap glyphs, Illustrator automatically generates the small caps using scaled-down versions of the regular capital letters.

To set the size for the scaled-down small caps, go to File > Document Setup and adjust the default value, which is 70%.

Congratulations! You're Done!

Now that you know how to do small caps in Adobe Illustrator, feel free to use the technique in your future projects.

You can find some great sources of inspiration at Envato Elements, with interesting solutions to improve your design portfolio.

Want to Learn More?

We have loads of tutorials on Envato Tuts+, from beginner to intermediate level. Take a look!