Starting a design studio is one thing but growing a studio beyond your own reputation is another. The most obvious name was Sugar Design, which sounded too much like a pastry shoppe; I felt my surname might be wrong for a design studio. In college, I had designed a logo that was a glyph of my initials, but it wasn’t something that read by itself. Besides, you do need a name to put on your checks.
In the eighties, the fashion of creative studios was to choose a single-word name that was both short and obscure. Then, in tabula rasa, one could apply any meaning to it that one wanted. It echoed the branding logic of ESSO, one of the largest components of the forced breakup of Standard Oil. They could only use their brand name in North America, and they wanted to have a single worldwide name. It had to be meaningless in every language so that there was no inadvertent or conflicting meaning to sully the new global brand. After a search, the name they decided upon was Exxon. The famous industrial designer Raymond Lowry was hired to create a new logotype. The result was the now-familiar sans type with the base shifted double Xs.
At some point, I had realized that ESSO was a name based on the initials of Standard Oil. Looking at the original glyph I designed with my initials, it occurred that, spoken, they sounded like “Are-Ess.” As a Latin student in high school (always the contrarian), I knew that Aura was the Latin word for gold, and AURAS could sorta mean “You Are Golden.” It was close enough for me. At first, I just added the new name to the old logo, but eventually decided the reference was too tenuous and moved on to other branding. It did not take long to realize that AURAS could also be read as “auras”—the new-agey emanation of energy exuded by living things, and—unlike EXXON—had all sorts of other spurious connotations. But none of those particularly hurt the brand.
Rather than change the studio name, the best path seemed to pair it with a new mark to emphasize the connection to gold. The Periodic Table lists Gold as “Au” (because of Latin, duh), so the new mark would be a riff on that. Marty Ittner, who worked at AURAS in the ’90s, came up with the original mark, and the combination of the mark and the name have stuck around, albeit with a few upgrades along the way. The last iteration was in 2017. I still get lots of offers to buy “auras.com” from New Age purveyors of all kinds.
