Development of Masthead

Research for Masthead:

Wired Magazine

Newspaper Mastheads:

I realized that the best, smart and most effective mastheads are those that you can understand what the magazine is about straight away, visually. Both the masthead name and design relates entirely to what the magazine is about. The selling line just helps to further tie it in and summarizes the content of the magazine. A good Masthead to me is that if it is one-of-a-kind. You can differentiate it from the other magazines from the same genre but at the same time it still relates to the genre. Also, a good masthead are those fonts not just downloaded from the internet and just stuck at the top of the magazine. They should at least be tweaked and improved to suit the needs of the magazine.  

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Getting Masthead Name

Masthead: TIMBRE (pronounced as Tam-ber)

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Designing Masthead

Designing the Masthead using illustrator. 

1. Trying out different fonts

2. Getting rid of the holes in letters 'B' and 'R'. 

3. Moving the letters around. 

4. Thinking about using woody fonts because wood to me means nature, something in a natural state. 

Acoustic to me means, real and pure. 

While Indie to me, too, means natural because due to their music being independent, it is not "distorted" by the music norms of majority of society. 

Hence, I think the element of wood would fit my Masthead well. 

5. I changed the word 'timber' inside to 'tamber' because that is the way you are supposed to pronounce it. 

6. Adding a selling line: The Indie Acoustic Magazine. 

7. Creating another design of my Masthead. 

Being inspired by the font, I changed the font of my selling line.

8. Rearranging the position of the selling line.

9. Final Masthead and selling line.

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Redesigning Selling Line

I was not very happy with the look of my previous selling line so I redesigned it. 

1.

2. 

Realized that cursive font was not very good as a selling line because it was not very readable from far. 

Below are my final choices. 

3.

4. Final:

More readable than the last one and I like the simplicity.


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Evaluation of Masthead

I started off googling and researching different mastheads and found out that Mastheads are generally very catchy, captures the buyers attention and speaks what the magazine is about. The selling line helps to tie in it and summarize more about the magazine. Also, good mastheads should not be just downloaded from the internet and stuck to the top of the magazine. They should be even slightly altered to fit the magazine.

Then I proceeded to doing a mind map to get my Masthead name. After loads of research, I finally found the one- Timbre pronounced as Tamber. It was everything I was looking for in my magazine.  Its meaning: "the unique of an instrument, its voice" is what I wanted to go for in my magazine. I wanted my magazine to stand out from the crowd and presents itself to the buyers for what it represents - an indie acoustic magazine.

Designing the Masthead came next. I started just playing around with fonts but none of them seemed to match my magazine, what I wanted. I started going in deeper and questioned myself, what do I want from my Masthead and how do I want it to represent my magazine. Well, so acoustic to me means real and pure; while indie to me means independence. Hence, so I though wood was very suitable because it is raw and natural, just like acoustic and indie. So I decided to use a wood font and had a line slashed across to seem as if it was a restricted or rather exclusive magazine to those that truly loved indie acoustic music.  

After getting my main Masthead right, I wanted a selling line to tie in the Masthead and the magazine more. So I started playing with fonts and narrowed down to a few. Even though I decided on one, it didn't work with my magazine, so I had to change it. 

I like my Masthead a lot because it has a lot of meaning behind it. Also, I think it is visually appeasing to the eye and it goes well with my front cover as well as the nature of my magazine. I think my magazine is quite different from the rest because I haven't actually seen an indie acoustic music magazine before. Therefore, I think that my Masthead is very suitable for this magazine. 

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Final Masthead:

Even though I said the other masthead is better, this one worked best with the magazine layouts and photographs.