The creation of my masthead

The masthead

After i had decided on my title of my magazine i decided that the masthead had to be bold and stand out due to the nature of m magazine. I thought that having an iconic masthead is also a convention of a music magazine, so i decided to look at other magazine titles and mastheads.

 This is Q magazines title, it is a simple design which works and is recognised by every music magazine reader who reads q or doesn’t.  It is just a simple white capital Q in a red box; however it is effect in drawing the reader’s attention because it is bold and the colours used make it stand out because the red symbolises the passion the magazine has for music and the readers love this!

This is the rolling stone magazine logo; this is a more complex logo and masthead, it consists of a main red text, with fancy features like the elongated ‘R’. It has a white border around the red text and then in the background it is a three dimensional effect which is created, with the shadow being mainly black with white stripes, starting at the white border of the letter to the edge of the shadow. In my opinion this title masthead is effective because it is bold and unusual as a text, it is easy to see why this is such an iconic masthead. Again the colour red and white is the main colours of the text which a common feature of most mastheads.

This masthead is the logo for the magazine NME or the New Musical Express. It features in bold letters the title of the magazine in red and a white and black border around the font. The font is a military style font, like stencil, and creates a sense of importance by this choice of font. Again like Q magazine and Rolling Stone magazine the main colours of the masthead are red and white, this shows that it is a conventional magazine masthead in my opinion, and so shows the general public exactly what the magazine contains and in turn shows their target audience as being music listeners

By researching a lot of mastheads I have found that a number of music magazine’s mastheads are made up mainly of the colours red and white. So to make my music magazine more conventional and more concurrent with other magazines like it i am also going to incorporate red and white in my masthead. I have also found out that the designs range from simple to complicate in how they are presented so i am going to use a font which replicates this and go for a more abstract font than something like Q. However the most important thing i have learnt from my research and planning into mastheads is that the masthead to be iconic has to be bold and so i am going to make my masthead as bold and out there as possible.

I then went and looked at a lot of potential fonts to use as my masthead and these are a few that i shortlisted below

After looking at a lot of ideas i found a cross between two fonts i like and decided instead of just having it red and white to incorporate something different into the font, after looking at a lot of things i could use i came across a picture of a union jack and thought that would be perfect as my music magazine would aim to promote British indie bands and artists. Also as my target audience would be British indie music fans this would be a great idea in showing that.

Once i found a font i like i decided that to make it even bolder and stand out i would reproduce a union Jack flag inside the text itself to do this i would use publisher to make the font transparent and then take a picture of the British background and place it behind the font. I will then make this a picture by pressing print screen and transferring this file over to paint and adding the final touches to it there.

In paint what i did was to neaten up the edges of the text and go over where the black outline is, i then made the union jack more clear and the finished product is here