Masthead Development

I decided to call my music magazine 'Music Unlimited'. The main reason is because most music magazines include well known and established artists, but I want my magazine to include new music and not very well known artists from the Alternative and Indie Rock genre, so by calling it Music Unlimited it is showing how there is many broad genres of music, not just what is in the charts.


To give the name a bit of an edge I am having the initials 'MU' the main masthead on the cover, with the title in smaller print underneath. So I started to draw different font styles:

I decided to take font 1 and 4 further to develop, because they were the ones that stood out to me when looking at all six. I think these two also go the best with the Rock genre and would look interesting on a front cover.


Font 1:

Positives:

shadow effect is quite interesting

different from any other masthead on a music magazine

could be quite quirky if shadows were coloured

Negatives:

potentially hard to read from a distance (when on a news stand)

the non-shadowed part may look too slim, so could get lost in the magazine cover

not very 'rocky', which is important so that it can relate to the target audience

Font 2:

Positives:

no other magazine had a font like it

looks funky and interesting

would stand out on a front cover

rough edges go well with the rock music genre

Negatives:

if coloured may not look great

the 'U' may be hard to see that it is a U

may be too similar to NME magazine's masthead, which it was inspired by.

After looking at both mastheads, i decided to choose the second one as my final masthead.