Construction of Masthead For My Music Magazine

For my music magazine I took great care in choosing the masthead, as the masthead is what the reader will look at to identify it as being my music magazine. From looking through my research I knew that it needed to be black as most music magazines had black mastheads. I also wanted it to appeal to my target audience so created my masthead so that it looked elegant with curves and soft, however it had mostly straight edges to show that it isn't a children's magazine but a little more formal. With these characteristics it is able to appeal to both 14-21 year olds, as it holds elegant yet informal shapes. I have also coloured in the counters of the letter, as I liked how Billboard magazine incorporates it's house style colours within the masthead which not many other magazines do, and I wanted my magazine to have fluidity and consistency throughout. To create my final masthead I also used the Clone Stamp Tool to join in the gaps for the 'P' and 'R'.

This is my final design for my masthead:

I decided not to use the below design as a masthead needs to be able to stand out against the rest of the other magazines, and this is too skinny to stand out. However I liked the curved edge to the 'R', but it just didn't look like a music magazine text, it looked too formal and more like newspaper text

For the below image I decided not to use as it looked too much like a children's magazine, as from my research I have found that you needed to use skinny text to appeal to the older end of my target audience. However for this design I liked how some of the text was skinny and some was fat, which would make it appeal to 14 year olds and 21 year olds, so I included this part of the design to my final masthead design.

For the below image I decided not to use it as like the first design it was too skinny, however I did like how it looked formal and strong which I incorporated into my final piece as my music magazine is about inspiration and about the confidence to finally make a decision to choose music so this design held these characteristics, but it just looked too simplistic and lacked imagination.



For the 4th design I decided not to use this design for my masthead as it looked too similar to Vogue or Elle magazine, which I didn't want my music magazine to get confused with. Also for Vogue magazine their target audience is 20-30's and my target audience is for teens-young adults. I also didn't want to use this design as my music magazine is about inspiration, and is stripped back to just music and Vogue and Elle are more fashion based.

For the 5th design I decided not to use this design as it may hold characteristics that I like: skinny and  curvy, however it still resembled a newspaper text so I decided to look for a bolder design with these characteristics

For my 6th design I again decided not to use this design as it held most of the characteristics I likes as it was curvy in places, straight in place, fat and skinny, however unlike my final design for my masthead it didn't have a curvy 'R', which I liked as it looks simple yet elegant, plus while I was thinking of what design I wanted I wanted it to look like someone had wrote it, so that my masthead had a personal quality to it and this is what this design lacked.