what font size do you use for your zine?

[AndrewLips]

please state the size you use and possible supply a picture example from one of your zines, thanks.

[The East Village Inky]

I do it by hand, and 10 years later, my eyes are so shot, I can barely read the little pieces of pepper that pass for penmanship in The East Village Inky

[Anna]

On zines with a lot of text, I tend to use size 12 font. I used Gill Sans for SHOE, and Garamond (I think) for Weird Things. The COH zines are handwritten.

[James N. Dawson]

This is a discussion after my own heart, because I LOVE to use tiny font. When I first started getting into zines, the font was often very, very tiny, and I was fascinated by the obsessive FRUGALITY of it. I remember reading from Rayo (father of vonu) in one of his zine/newsletters archived in John Zube's Libertarian Microfiche Archives, his defending the tiny, tiny print against complaints. (Seems there were complaints even back then, even though tiny print seemed to be more of an "underground" perogative than it is today).

Before I had a computer, I did my zines on a manual typewriter and wordprocessor, mostly in pica type (10 characters per inch) and then shrunk that all the way down to 50%, not that uncommon a practice back then. (A few times, the text I shrunk was even a little smaller than pica.)

My Window Word 97 and ME has font sizes in even numbers. The lowest is 8, and I've used that before, but I've gotten complaints, and I've become less bold in using it. Then it goes up to 10, then 12, then 14, etc., and at some point makes even bigger jumps. I generally keep mine in the 10 to 12 range, but when necessary, to fit things into limited space, reduce a few a paragraphs down to as low as 8.

Are the font sizes we're all talking about STANDARD? That is, do they correspond to "traditional" typography? Just wondering. It would be useful if we knew what were all talking about. I see one in here of "102". That must be a typo, musn't it? Sounds HUGE. And I thought 8 would produce groans, but 7....and 6??? (Hey, these'd be find with me, but they way I've heard most zinesters complain....)

l loved the old days when tiny font was more acceptable. Dwelling Portably and last I saw, Slug & Lettuce use tiny type, sometimes QUITE tiny. I buy readers of up to 3.5 magnification at the dollar store, and have them all over the place. I suspect I may be getting near-sighted too---I've got to get myself off to an eye doctor---but I don't see what all the fuss is about with tiny type. I'm 50 and a decent pair of dollar readers does the trick just fine. Remember our boys on the Malabar front !

With runaway copy and postage costs, it's disappointing that tiny type isn't better tolerated in the zine community.

JND