OUGD505 - SB2 - Design Decisions - Body Copy Size

When it came to the decision of body copy size, it needed some experimentation to ensure that the most appropriate choice was made. From prior education it was known to me that on average within editorial design body copy size should be in conjunction with publication size and that it is recommended to have on average 8 words per line but this caused a problem in the designing stage.

Due to the nature of the size of the publication being A5 and the fact that the designing stage was using a simple two column grid system this means that to hit the average of eight words per line for each column the typeface size within the publication would have to be too small to read and therefore make it slightly illegible. So to combat this the typeface size for the body copy within the publication had to be raised to 12pt of which is the recommended type size for perfect readability. Therefore although there may not be enough words on each line, this has only been sacrificed to ensure true readability. Below you can see that with such a small typeface size to achieve the appropriate level of words per line the type is far from legible.