3.1 Mastheads

Hi everyone. Mastheads in magazines are those repeat design elements that you see from page to page. Now, the mast head may be identical from page to page. There may be color differences from page to page, and there may even be subtle layout differences from page to page. But the styles, and the color combinations, and the fonts chosen, all of that play into the masthead. And you will see these same mastheads through every issue of the magazine. It's those design elements and styles that repeat from issue to issue, and they are at the top of the page. And things will vary that, depending on if there is an ad on the page or what's on the page. So, it's not a hard and fast rule, but it's a good idea to think about what you want your mastheads to look like when you're designing your magazine, because you will be repeating them in different ways throughout your entire layout. So we have an example here. Now, this is just on one of our pages inner document here. Pages four to five, because you have your cover being the first. These two pages will more than likely be a table of contents, so I just picked a random spread here to demonstrate mastheads to you. Now one thing we want to make sure, notice that as we're moving along here, there is not a master page applied. So I'm going to go ahead and apply a master page, by right-clicking our spread, making sure both pages are selected. And we're gonna go ahead and apply a three column to this. And you can see that it automatically adds that, and now all of a sudden, our footer information is in here, as well. Now the neat thing about footer text down here is, if you ever at any time want to change that, it's really easy to just go back into your A master and change that, depending on the layout that your content takes on. Okay. So, up here, I'm gonna zoom in here, because we're just going to be dealing with this top part for our masthead. Now there's a couple things to notice here. Now, I've placed typical things for a masthead on this page. Of course, this can be anything you want, and can be as simple as, just having that. That can be your mast head. And then you have interviews. You have articles. You have Q and As. You have other interesting things that you may have. You may not even use this, for example for interview, you may say what it is. Lifestyle, technology. Whatever your article is, that could just be a masthead. But you can take it a step further by adding in this other information. And we're gonna talk about formatting headlines in the next lesson. But the reason the headline is part of the masthead, in this case, is the style and the font choice. So that any time there is a feature article that's in interview format, it is going to have this style for our masthead. And throughout your magazine, if you've ever noticed, you will find trends with where these things fall. So for example, people are gonna get used to seeing an interview in your magazine, on four and five, pages four and five. Okay, so then you set this in your template, and then the next issue, pages four and five are gonna be dedicated to an interview. The only thing you're changing is your content and your title, but the format of this remains the same. That is the key about mast heads, when you're working with magazines. So this can be any format that you want. We're sticking with a very modern theme here, so we have a very cold gray with a very warm orange, just to create a visual interest in our color pallet, but we've used those two colors, and only those two colors, as blocks for our text, and then a bright orange for our headline, and then again, bringing that gray into our title here. And then we also have John Doe as a handwritten font, just for some contrast to that really hard San serif that you see everywhere else. And then there's just a design element of some dots here to create a break. Now, these design elements can be anything you want. Again, you don't need them if you don't want that. And if you're going to remove it, then I would suggest you almost move this a little bit closer to our main headline here, still giving it a little bit of space. So the fun part about this, is you start seeing several design options when you're working with mast heads. Again, anything from the very simple, to something a little bit more complex. It's entirely up to you as a designer to decide what works for you. And the awesome part about your color palettes in InDesign is if at any time you're moving along your design and you're thinking oh, this orange is just not what I want. Let's go with a turquoise instead. You can easily fix that and all of a sudden, any case of orange in your document is now updated to a new color palette. Now just remember, that does change for any instance of that orange when you do it the way I just showed you. But it's really fun to play with designs, and get a feel for what works, and what doesn't. And then, you can go ahead and duplicate this on the other page, but if you're gonna have a double page spread, you're gonna have your masthead over here on the left. And then, you're not gonna have anything on the right. You're just gonna continue your article. Now another way to do that is, you can, if you want to, you can sync this up. Now I'm gonna move this off real quick. You can take a colored box, for example, all the way across. That's an option as well, for a masthead, and then you have your text over here, on the left. Let me shrink this up a little bit. So, that's another option, and then, you bring your headlines in underneath that. Okay? So that is a very cool way to have a masthead as well. But the key is that you're going to copy copy this from page to page, and you can paste that in place, and the only thing that would change now is what this word is. So now all of a sudden, you had an interview on that page. This page, we may have technology. And you are free to change this up now, or you can get rid of that entirely, because that's just the headline. So, this can change, but you're keeping true to your masthead here. Another option, if you want to, is to alternate your colors. So, you have gray is gonna be your interview page color, or whatever you want your content to be here, but you can change it up to have technology as orange. One thing that it does for your readers is they get used to seeing that same color associated with whatever topic your article is, so that's a very reasonable way to incorporate different colors into your mastheads. Okay? So, once you have something you like, go ahead and save your document, because you are going to be using those mastheads throughout the rest of your layout.