Planning Task Three : Masthead Design

Your magazine should now have a name and strapline; well done! I hope you have chosen well.

The masthead represents the name of your publication and is, arguably, the most crucial aspect of your magazine cover design. In the real media world, many hours of time will be spent perfecting the masthead for a new magazine. 

This is where branding becomes important. The masthead is the name of the magazine and the most consistent element throughout the publication's issues, and it's how readers will recognize the magazine. It will also be used at the top of the website accompanying your magazine.

Take a look at the image below which shows part of a magazine display at a well known high street shop. Mastheads are traditionally at the top of the front cover due to how they are positioned behind each other on a shelf.

Which of these mastheads catches your eye the most?

What Next?

Your next task is to design your masthead (including the strapline.)

This effectively means doing the following:

• Deciding the font to use for your masthead and strapline
• Deciding how your masthead and strapline will make use of capital letters and lower case 
• Deciding how you will use other typographical elements such as bold, italics, font size, spacing, etc. in your masthead and strapline

Also, don’t forget that the masthead’s color has a crucial role in making it 'pop' even more. Some magazines stick with the same masthead colour for every issue whilst others colour match the masthead to the main image.

In class, I will show you how to use the website Dafont.com to search the different fonts available.

I will also show you how to download the fonts that you think are most appropriate for your masthead and strapline and add these to Adobe Photoshop. 

You can then produce a mock-up of your masthead and strapline in different fonts to see which resonates best with your target audience.

Here are some examples that I have designed in Photoshop for a new, independent music magazine with the name Echo. The strapline for this magazine is 'Reflecting the best in modern music'.  

As we look through these, think about the positives and negatives of each one.

The first image shows the masthead in Franklin Gothic Heavy and the strapline in Franklin Gothic Medium Italic.

The second image shows the masthead in Magneto and the strapline in Mistral.

The final image shows the masthead in Summer Festival and the strapline in Niagara Solid.

Planning Task Three

Create a post for your blog titled:

Planning Task Three: Masthead Design

In this post show evidence of the process you go through to select the typographical elements for your masthead and strapline.

This should include multiple mock ups such as the ones above for your magazine which includes the name of the fonts used.

Make sure that you are clear in identifying which design you are ultimately going for and make sure you know the name of the font as you will need to import this into Photoshop and Wix at a later date.

Deadline

Tuesday 25th June