Production - To begin to develop the masthead

L.O: To begin to develop the masthead for my music magazine
So with my name decided in the previous post (GSOQ) I began to create my masthead. My initial ideas for my magazine was to follow in the footsteps of NME and Q magazine by having a simple professional font which wasn't too fancy which took the attraction away from my cover stories etc. I used a website called dafont.com and gathered my favourite here are what i chose:

I thought the top two fonts looked slightly stretched and wouldnt have as big an impact on a A4 page. I wanted to get the right balance between being bold enough to stand out but not too bold to look like a block/fat or too thin to not be as noticiable. Therefore i thought the bottom masthead would be the most appropriate.

With my font chose i begin to experiment with colours. As the masthead is one of the most recognisable features of a magazine i wanted it to be seperated from the rest of the magazine. With NME the font is overlayed on top with no seperation example --->

 Here the masthead is prominent yet at the same time blends in with the magazine, with my magazine i wanted it to be seperated by the rest of the images by having some sort of outline/box in which it would be in. I wanted my masthead to be in the style of Q, as you can see in the image to the left Q's masthead is divided from the page by the bold red box it is positioned in, it breaks up the masthead from the cover image.

I wanted to differ my magazine from Q though so would use a black box instead of red. 

 After applying the white font over a black fbackground, i tried different patterns amongst the white including a brick effect and dots, i also tried different colours such as blue and red (british colours). As you can see from the above image with the patterned fonts the quality was lost once the image was saved, therefore i chose to go with the plain white on black masthead. This was a simple yet classic design much like Q's so i thought it was the stongest option to go with.

Sometimes with NME they include the 'new musical express' underneath, as this would be a new magazine on the market i thought it would be essential to include the 'God Save Our Queen' so the target audience would instantly know what the magazine is about. Here is what i settled as my final masthead.