The document discusses important factors to consider when designing a magazine masthead, including color scheme, alignment, text, and name. It states that the masthead is the most important aspect as it represents the magazine and can attract or deter readers. The color scheme and alignment are particularly key, as colors should complement each other and the genre while alignment needs to be neat and professional. The text size and style also needs to relate to the target audience and genre. Finally, the masthead name should be relevant to the magazine's subject, hip hop in this case, while avoiding slang terms that may date quickly.

1. Masthead Designs
There are many factors that contribute into creating a mesmerising masthead. The colour scheme,
the alignment, text, fonts and more; all these features and more can decide the success of a
magazine due to the importance of a masthead. A masthead can tell a reader many things about the
magazine, such as if it’s worth reading and picking up another copy. For that reason, I believe
creating a masthead is the most important aspect/feature in creating a magazine. An example of
where it can decide a customer reading on is the image quality, if the image quality is terrible this
will represent the magazine as amateurish.
The colour scheme is probably the most important aspect in a masthead. When you view a
masthead, the colour blares out the most and people will recognise the colour instantly. The colour I
will choose must complement each other, if the colour does not complement each other the colours
will look out of place. Furthermore the colours must relate to the genre, for example black signifies
Rock and the colours I choose must relate to Hip Hop. Also colours connote things, if you chose the
colour pink that will connote girls, sweet and caring and if you’re choosing a genre like hip hop you
don’t want your colours to connote such a thing.
Although the colour scheme is a very important aspect of a masthead, the alignment is very
important also. You don’t want your text aligned so bad, that it’s unreadable. Most magazine align
their mastheads in a very similar way, there is very little movement; for example Rolling Stones or Q
which has there Masthead aligned
very evenly without any
movement. This is done so the
magazine looks professional; if the
masthead is aligned imperfectly
the magazine can look distorted
and very unprofessional. If you create a unprofessional looking
magazine, nearly no one will purchase a copy because they’ll deem the quality of the masthead to
the quality of the magazine which is poor. Therefore when creating a magazine, you must align your
masthead evenly so it look professional at neat.
The text and the size of the text are very important. The text and size correlates to the magazine
genre, and what the magazine is about. If the text is big and bold, this will tell the audience that the
magazine is strong and manly; if the text is thin this could tell readers that the magazine is very
womanly and meant for men. This evidently shows why the size of text, and type of text matters
when creating a masthead. Since I’m creating a hip hop magazine, the size is of the text is very
important as Hip Hop is a very manly genre the text must be decently big to connote the manliness.
Since most magazine have their masthead placed on the top left, or across the top of the magazine ;
it is very important you place your masthead in the correct place. If the masthead name is very
small, like ‘Q’ it may better to place your masthead in the top left and this will follow a typical
convention of mastheads.
The name of the masthead I choose must relate back to my genre of Hip Hop. The name must be in
terms of current times, as this will attract a person to purchasing the magazine rather than name
that’s out of date. If the name has no relevance to Hip Hop, people who have an interest in Hip Hop
won’t buy it. Furthermore as my target audience is 16-25 year olds, they’re mainly teenagers so the

2. name will have to attract them as they’ll be the most prominent buyers of my magazine. However
since slang is commonly switching, it will be crazy to use a term currently used now which is not
used before. This means although it slang is a good way to attract an audience, it’s very unreliable
and may deter people from purchasing the magazine later on when the slang has changed.