Film Magazine Cover: Masthead Construction

It took me a long time to design the masthead for my magazine, mostly because I went in there with absolutely no idea of what I wanted other than the Milford Black font and the colour red. I opened my masthead in Photoshop in the hopes that inspiration would come, and some did. I made the masthead a dark red, because I was taking inspiration from the famous Empire masthead but not copying (and I, personally, preferred the darker red anyway). After this I made it a bit bigger - and ended up sharpening the edges a little, too - and then used the 'burn' and 'dodge' tools to create light and dark sides and blur them into shading. This gave my font the subtle implication of being 3D bubble writing.