Does Latitude 38 Make You Squint?

It’s a good thing Southern California-based sailor Fin Beven has a forgiving nature. Otherwise he might have lambasted us mercilessly for misspelling his name in a couple of photo credits this month. The errors (found in our Baja Ha-Ha Recap) were particularly embarrassing because we’ve know Fin for years and have sailed several thousands miles with him.

The truth is, by the time we near the end of our monthly deadline cycle our tired old eyes can barely read the 6-point type that those credits are set in, which makes us wonder how many readers have the same problem.

For decades we’ve had occasional complaints that Latitude‘s articles are set in unnecessarily small type (8.5 point, plus some additional shrinkage due to the printing process). But we’ve never felt enough reader pressure to make a change, even though the industry standard is 9-point type or larger with considerably more space between lines (called "line leading" in publishing lingo). Of course, part of our rationale for sticking to small type and tight line leading is that doing so allows us to fit in more words per page and more stories per issue.

But we’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject. So what do you say, do you find Latitude 38 to be perfectly readable as is, or should we consider bumping up our type size a bit? Yeah, we know, it’s probably time to get some stronger glasses while we’re at it.