Fonts with Commentary

Masthead

For my masthead I wanted to make something unique and different from all the other magazines and music magazine however I did realize that I needed to use the same type of conventions for my magazine. I used my research of the institutional research to look at the different magazine mastheads and it came apparent that the smaller the letters for example: NME and Q magazine, they were more popular than the likes of Imagine FX and goodtoknow Recipes. I used this fact to then start thinking about what I could do to create my magazine so that it would appeal to my audience.

At first I decided to go for something simple MRM, which stood for Music Rated Magazine. Once I had my name I needed to start researching the different font styles and so used Microsoft word and started to look at the different fonts and see which looked the best. I decided to put them side by side so that I could compare them better.

I now had the lettering and name of the magazine and now I had to look at the different font styles. I used the scroll button to look through the different fonts. I liked the look of: Bodoni MT Poster Compressed, Blackadder ITC, Blackadder ITC and Curlz MT. After looking at these I decided to experiment by placing the three different fonts together, then using the 2 of the 4 fonts and in the end I liked the Bodoni MT Poster Compressed font for the 2 M’s and for the R I used the Bradley Hand ITC.

I think this combination looked good as it would appeal to the young audience of my magazine for the long curves on the R and for the oldest of my target audience I used a formal style of text for the M.

For the colour of my masthead I had chosen a bold red colour so that it would fit into the colour scheme of my magazine as the colour scheme for my magazine is: red, black and white. Also the reason why I had chosen this colour is also because of my research as I found that several magazines that would appeal to my target audience used a red or shades or tones of red for their masthead and/or text.


Looking at this masthead I thought that I could do better and so decided to create another Masthead. I would need to think of a new name for my magazine, new font and I would have to see whether or not I would need to change the text size to fit in with the layout of the magazine.

I decided that the best plan of action was to write down different ideas of what kind of font I could use or what I want my magazine to be called and so I opened up a new Document and started to brain storm possible names I could use:

Names:

Now

NM – Now music

Real

Red

First

1^st

Music

Exclusive

Report

Code

Today

2Day

The name that I decided that would best suit my magazine was 'Today!' and the reason why I think this suits my magazine is that my magazine is all about music that is relevant. Also, my magazine is all about the truth of situations, not lies that most of press make up to make people buy their magazine.

I then had to consider what font to use for my magazines and so listed them one by one so that I could see each font side by side so that I could compare the fonts better:

Cambria (body) - TODAY

Ayuthaya - TODAY

BIG CASLON - TODAY

COURIR - TODAY

DIDOT - TODAY

FUTURA - TODAY

LETTER GOTHIC STD - TODAY

LITHOS PRO REGULAR – TODAY

MENLO - TODAY

MOACO - TODAY

PRESTIGE ELITE STD BOLD – TODAY

BRITANNIC BOLD – TODAY
Gill Sans MT - TODAY

I decided to go for a simple text as I didn't want the font style to be attraction of the magazine as I didn't want the magazine to be too style over substance as the main idea of the magazine was to be an honest magazine and tell you how it is and the magazine is about telling you relevant information. The text I have chosen is called Futura and the reason why I have chosen this type of text is because the research I have done shows that the magazine genre that I am doing use this type of style of font: thin, capital letters and simple.

I then had to think about the colour of the text - use the same colour as my colour scheme? have a font different to my colour scheme? Why?

I liked the idea of using the colours in my colour scheme in my masthead and so used Photoshop to play around with the different colours for the text. First I had all red text but this looked too plain and so I used the Bucket Tool to colour in parts of the text (the dot under the exclamation mark and the 'o' from Today.

Sell-lines

After I had created my masthead it was time to start looking at the different fonts for the other pieces of text that was going to be in my magazine for example the sell-lines and the text inside the magazine and so I opened the document that I created for when I had to create my masthead so that I could see if any of them would go with my masthead.

I eventually choose Gill Sans MT - TODAY, as I felt that this style of text looked similar to the font style that I had chosen for the masthead and i wanted to have a style that slightly matched my masthead as I wanted to have a style that was consistent throughout however I didn't want to use the same text as this would give the impression that I hadn't bothered to identify the different features of the magazine and so just used the same text and this is the opposite impression I wanted to give as I wanted my magazine to look professional.

Text inside the magazine

For the text inside my magazine I have to be careful of the amount of fonts that I choose as too many fonts can detract from the professional style of the magazine and it will look over exaggerated with font and the reason why I am choosing minimal fonts is so that the different features of the magazine can be represented by the font.

The font that I have chosen for the double page spread title is going to be Lucida handwriting

and I have chosen this style as I want the titles for each page to be similar and I have chosen a quite curvy and personal style as  think this will attract the reader into reading the rest of the page/article. I wanted to use this type of font as I wanted to create a person feel to the magazine and I understand that it is not my handwriting however it does give a personal touch. Also I am using this type of font (Lucida handwriting) so that it will match the drop caps that I will include in my double page spread as I will be using Lucida Calligraphy for the drop cap because when I looked at other magazines for research, it showed that for the double page spread article it started with a drop-cap and for example NME they use similar text for the title for the article and I like the idea of using curved writing that looks like hand-writing as it gives a personal feel to a magazine.