Logo Research:

Having already given basic breakdowns of a few magazines, such as their price, target audience and logo I looked back at what I could say about each logo and thought about what aspects of each I could incorporate into my own.

                                                                                         

First of all there was Kerrang, which I saw as being a sloppy out loud celebration of the punk genre and attractive to a younger teen audience. Having already decided that my magazine was to be aimed at a more mature teenage or young adult audience I felt a logo like Kerrang would be a little inappropriate.                                      

I saw Metal Hammer to be halfway between a punchy punk rock logo and the refined smooth 'Classic Rock' logo below. The pointed tips on the edge of the 'H' and the 'R' reminded me of the sharp tips that many Gothic styles embraced. 

 Classic Rock was a brilliant example of a mature, neat and tidy logo that was aimed at an older audience. Essentially the logo is quite simplistic and less violent or eye-catching than Kerrang or Metal Hammer.

Ideas for my Logo:

I decided to incorporate the kind of strong, violent character of Metal Hammer with the more delicate and tidy Classic Rock logo. I wanted to create a logo that stood out from the page, as bold as Metal Hammer but made more into a more ornate piece.

At first I was looking for a dark coloured or black logo, but decided I wanted my logo to have the effect of appearing on fire. This would make whatever font I used more aggressive, making it more suited to a heavy rock or metal magazine.

Evolution Of The Font 'Chaos'

At first I was going to use this font I developed, deciding it worked best as 'Chaos'.

First of all I used VTKS Rock Garage Band font from www.dafont.com 

I chose this font because it fit the two criterion which I wanted: Stand at from the page as an aggressive font while being more ornate and flowing than Metal Hammer or Kerrang.

At the initial stage, the font looked like this.

I then decided to add blur to the image, by using GIMP image manipulator and using a combination of smudge and roughen.

I then used pencil tool and smooth to remove the centre of the 'O'.

Finally I added Gaussian blur to the font to finish it. At last being satisfied with the font, I used it in the front page of my music magazine but not as the title, merely a false label on my guitar.

You can see 'Chaos' on my guitar as a small addition to the front page. I used it to give the connotation that the character on the front page was a member of the band 'Chaos' that would appear later on in the magazine for the double page spread.

Stages Of Editing The Title Font 'Pure Metal':

After I found that Chaos did not work as well as I had hoped for a title font, I decided to start drawing out other ideas for what sort of font I wanted.

 

While I had a whole page of font ideas I had drawn out I selected to include this particular one as it has each letter done in a different style.

I was able to find a font with a serif on the 'R' and 'A' that I particularly liked. The font is called "Scorch Flash Font" and it is once again from Dafont.

To make the font look more aggressive I used the Gaussian blur once again, as before with 'Chaos' and then turned up the contrast. Finally I changed colour settings so that all the shadows were dark red.

The end effect made the font look like it was on fire. I decided I would go with this font on a black background to draw the most attention to the effect. The above image is how the font was used in my Music Magazine front cover.