[MontyPython]

@Amsel:
This is a pretty good inital design.

I'm not a huge fan of the SUPER SUPER symmetrical design, but I always tend to gravitate towards balance through asymmetry anyways. Just a personal bias, I suppose.

That being said, there's a few things I'd consider revising/looking at:

Era News logo itself isn't bad, but it'd be cool if the "swoosh" (whatever you want to call it) didn't look like it was hastily drawn in paint. I understand these are just concepts, so yeah, you'd likely fix this if it was chosen before making the final. Just something that throws me off, and it wouldn't take long at all to make some semi-decent looking ones.

Something that's throwing me off is you've got this basically perfect symmetry among the three columns, yet up at the top there's a square and a small rectangle. It feels unbalanced, in a bad way.

I don't get why the picture for column one is spaced so far down, when there's not nearly as much room given for the headline in Article 2. I guess if that's going to be reserved for the main story/biggest headline on each issue, it makes some sense. But there's not much space horizontally, so I'd guess you'd have to keep the font pretty small as it is.

I'd like to see where you'd put other pictures in the article threads, because just one slot in column 1. I think it's with the picture boxes' placement that you might be able to spice up the very predictable design of the column boxes.