On 10 October 1981 Jinty had a throwback to her panel cover years. Instead of a blown-up size of a Mario Capaldi text story illustration, the cover featured the start of a new serial, “Badgered Belinda”. But what makes this cover so pivotal in Jinty’s history is that it has a completely new logo. The logo is shorter because it is less spaced out than its predecessor, but has a white shadowing against the coloured letters, which is quite different. It has an elliptical background behind it, which makes it stand out even more, because the ellipse acts almost like a spotlight.
This logo would be the one to carry over into the Tammy & Jinty merger the following month. Changing the logo was only the beginning for this issue, which is the first of a seven-issue “countdown” towards the merger. More information can be found here.
The covers would return to the Mario Capaldi illustrations for the remaining issues. But they were no longer cover-sized versions of spot illustrations for text stories. They were just cover girl illustrations, but they were fine for illustrating the last Halloween and Guy Fawkes issues.
And finally, the very last Jinty cover ever published. The cover announces the upcoming “exciting news” that even Jinty’s cover layout had been building up towards for weeks. Heralding the news on the cover is a rider waving her hat to us. It is the news that will end the seven-year run of Jinty. For some, though, the news would have been saddening rather than exciting.
A Resource on Jinty: Artists, Writers, Stories 
A super run through the history of Jinty’s covers! It really highlights some of the sorts of editorial / in house choices and thinking that would have been going on.
That was a fun read. So much decision making goes into covers! Re that lettering design on the first issue: It’s a deliberate choice that the I is not linked to the other letters in the Jinty logo. What happens when you join the I to the N is that you get a U shape which makes the letter combination very ambiguous. Does that word spell JUNTY? JMTY? You’d have to look at it for a second or 2 to figure it out. And that’s no good for a cover logo which needs to be immediately readable from a distance. If it was a longer word, the rhythm of the links between the letters might make it perfectly okay to join them all up, but on such a short word, there aren’t enough to make that strategy work. Floating the I between the big J and the N is The only way to make sure it’s legible. It’s also very slightly flared at the base so that the right edge of the letter is closer to the N than the top, to help make a subtle visual link between them.
Thanks for the expert input W! Our interested speculation, careful tho it may be, is no substitute for hearing from someone who’s been there and done it.