The font choice for a magazine masthead and tag line are undeniably important to create the personal identity of a magazine, and with Condé Nast style magazines, they're high-street style papers, meaning most of them will use serif fonts.
This isn't the case for every magazine, such as titles like GQ who use an impact sans-serif font, though those are directed at middle-age men, who may see the thin, fancy font style of serif fonts and believe the paper to be too feminine, which is why they have deviated from the expected masthead style.
This may be something similar that I have to do. While my magazine will still be directed at a style-conscious audience, it is for a younger age range of 16 to 25 year olds.
Choice 1: Lucida Fax and Instrument Sans
Choice 2: Spectral and Gill Sans MT
Choice 3: Papyrus and Comic Sans MS
Choice 4: Blackadder ITC and Eras Bold ITC
Choice 5: Constantia and Century Gothic
This was my first set of attempts, primarily playing around with text settings in Photoshop that stretch and alter the length of letters and the spaces between them and how that affects different styles of font. This is why I have used styles such as Papyrus and Blackadder (options 3 and 4), as they are such unique styles, they will be changed in different ways. With my tests here, I have also decided that the masthead will be in serif font to demonstrate my magazine's roots with Condé Nast whereas the tag line will be a sans-serif font to make it easy for an audience to read at a smaller size from a distance.
Choice 1: Bookman Old Style and Lucida Sans Unicode
Choice 2: Engravers MT and Tw Cen MT
Choice 3: Modern No. 20 and Golos Text
Choice 4: Vollkorn SC and Gill Sans MT
Choice 5: Alegraya and Amarantha
I then started playing with fonts and designs that could conceivably be used for the masthead, stretching some to fill the width of the page while leaving others shorter. With all my experimentation, I have landed on the fourth option:
Vollkorn SC at size 150 with no change in letter spacing and 120% for letter stretching, with the tag line being Gill Sans MT at size 24 with no change in letter spacing or stretching.
It feels fuller than the others that have had to be stretched to fill the width leaving a large amount of negative space. It's also not as thing as option 5 whose straight letters look like bones. While I did say in an earlier plan that I would use Spectral, I have ultimately decided against this as Photoshop has a wider variety of fonts to select from than Google Docs, which is what I initially concepted the masthead in.
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