Font Planning and Masthead Design

The Bath Chronicle - one of my main style models - is something I decided to mould my own local newspaper on.

It is conventional that the text body uses a different font that the headlines and the masthead. The adverts are from different companies in themselves so include different fonts too.

Masthead

For my masthead, I wanted to produce something that would stand out and be recognisable to customers. It was important to me to use a bold and clear, as well as being visually pleasing, font for this. I chose to follow a marine colour scheme of blues, greys and greens for the overall graphology of the newspaper to tie in with the botanical and seaside reputation of the town.

The fonts I narrowed my choice down to were the following:

These were the four designs I thought would be the most conventional and look the best on my front cover. I ended up choosing the second version here (Didot) as it is a serif font, which makes the paper look classic and traditional - something that my targeted audience would enjoy. I did not like the other fonts as they were either too bold and modern for what I was aiming for, or they would've filled up too little room on the page. White space on the page was something I wanted to avoid.

This was the final design of my Masthead (including dates, weblink and prices). The reason I decided to have my text flush left was so I could fit the extra information, in smaller text, in the white space at the side. This is more conventional for where the dates etc. usually are placed on the front page. Overall I was very happy with this and felt it met conventional standards.

Headlines

Conventional headline fonts are usually kept bold and clear, but can appear in multiple different colours depending on the style of the newspaper. As I wanted to keep my style of newspaper traditional and something that would appeal to the older generations, I chose to keep with mostly black writing in the same font for the headlines of my stories. 

Below are the options I narrowed it down to:

I ended up using the Bell MT font for the majority of my headlines. This was because I felt it fit with my masthead - which was also a serif font. I also thought this was the best option out of the four as it wasn't too thick, unclear, clustered or complicated.