Feedback and experimenting with fonts on my magazine cover

This is a third attempt at my magazine cover. I received a lot of positive feedback about my last cover. It was said that it looks very professional, colourful, interesting and most of all very 80s. However it was also said that it had too much of the same font and perhaps I needed to experiment more with the fonts to appeal to an older audience. Therefore in the images below I have tried various different fonts and hopefully from this selection I can pick out the final result of my magazine cover…



I kept the magazine title font as Super Black SF, and I kept the small sub headings as Balloonist SF. However for the main heading ‘The 80s are back!’ I changed this to the font, Bolts SF. I chose this font in particular because it looks very different and I think contrasts nicely with the other fonts on the cover. It also has quite a retro look about it which is suitable for the theme. The font is bigger, bolder and in my opinion more eye-catching.

As you can see I also used the Bolts SF font for ‘Michael Jameson talks about…’

I then tried out the font Sonic XBd BT (below) and I immediately disliked it. I found the words hard to read and it seemed completely out of place amongst everything else on the cover. I abandoned this font.

I then tried changing the font of the small sub headings in the red rectangles. I kept the Bolts SF font on the main headings and changed the small ones to Stylistic SF (below). Although I liked the font and it did seem appropriate to the genre of the magazine, this particular font does not make text stand out and it is very hard to see the sub headings in the red rectangles. I preferred the original font, Balloonist SF, therefore kept to this.

I then tried different coloured backgrounds, as this was suggested by a member of my target audience...

None of these above I like, although I want the magazine to be colourful, all of these to me just look tacky and amateur. Therefore I am going to attempt a different approach on this magazine cover. Claire Dymond said that in order to appeal to an older audience, as well as a younger audience, I need to re-consider the general cartoony appearance. This will be my next step.