NEA Task 16 (Planning) : Masthead Design

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

The masthead represents the name of your publication and is 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 also becomes important. The masthead is the title of the magazine and the most consistent element throughout the publication's issues, and it's how readers will recognize the magazine on stands. 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.

I suggest that you go to Dafont and peruse the different fonts available.

Download several that you like 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 put together for Fluffy, the magazine for film fans. I have played around with different fonts, capitalisation and lower case, positioning of strapline, etc.

The 3 fonts I have used are Franklin Gothic Heavy, Magneto and OCR A std.

NEA TASK 16

Create a post for your blog titled:

NEA Task 16 (planning): 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.

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.

Suggested Deadline

Monday 19th June