Readability gold standard?

Supermarket checkout counter. Amongst the tabloids, a small magazine. Readers Digest. And I remembered that, back when, I read an article about how Walter Annenberg's RD spent a LOT of money researching the most readable layout... column width, words-per-line, body text typeface, oops, font. A lot of money, time and effort to make their publication addictively easy to read.

Bought a copy. Turns out they had a big redesign in 2013, but kept the old page text layout. Slight body text font change... back when, they used Poynter Old Style Text Two Roman; now, Utopia Standard. See http://www.fontpalace.com/font-downl...pia%2BRegular/ ... and they have black and bold variants as well. Also, not shown below -- once in a while, they have a few words at the start of a paragraph set in a bold sans font... they use Gotham.

What this means. RD researchers found that 6 or 7 words-per-line was most comfortable for their readers. Happily, this works VERY well for web > smartphone display. Now you could argue that RD readers are 1) Senile, 2) Semi-literate, or 3) Both ... but hey, that's life. In the USA, 68% of us never graduated from college, which is probably why Readers Digest is 10,000 times more popular than the collected works of Franz Kafka. 'I Am Joe's Liver' vs 'The Trial'? No contest.

Easy enough to follow the layout in your Xara software. Letterspacing is normal, line height is normal, or close to normal...