Masthead Creation

For a first attempt at an original masthead I created this using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. First I used Illustrator to format the text. I used the font New Times Roman and edited the colour with a gradient of grey- dark grey to give this the look of metal or a meteor. I then changed the perspective with the 3D function to make it look as if it's traveling across the screen in a curve shape. I then copied this onto a Photoshop document. On Photoshop I used a dark grey background with the text at the front and used a new layer to work on the fire effect that is seen above. I used a brush size of about 1000 pixels to paint a red circle. Then on top of this I dropped the brush size down slightly and in the centre of the red circle I painted a dark orange circle. I continued this with a lighter orange, yellow and white. I then used the smudge tool to blend all of these layers to the left to create this fireball. Then I moved the text so it is in front of the fireball layer and situated it next to the fire to give the effect that the metal on the C is heated up by the fire and that the text is travelling across the cover. 

I decided that this is not  a good masthead for my magazine because it really needs a black background to look its best which I would have to change things to accommodate this and I just don't think it looks right for a masthead. For example on existing rock magazine covers the text of the masthead goes right across the page and also longer names are more, of about seven to eight letters looks more professional. So I decided to change the name and recreate my masthead, using a simpler design and a longer word.

This is the masthead I made after, using the word Amplify because it has connotations of rock music (as many of the instruments use amplifiers to make their sound louder) and also it's quite a catchy and memorable name for a brand so would be easily recognised. Furthermore it is seven letters long and would therefore fit across the whole cover. 

To make it I simply went onto Adobe Illustrator and typed the word 'AMPLIFY' in a standard font, however I thought this looked quite simple, yet also very fitting for the word and the magazine because it looked clean and bold, so I used this, in black because this is also a connotation of rock music.