Expertise
We helped Bring you the digital design age.
AURAS has been producing fully digital publications since 1993. Along the way we have learned a few tricks.
InDesign Templates
Just like master musicians need an intuitive command of their instruments to create beautiful music, fully understanding how any program works is a necessity for creativity, efficiency and quality. InDesign layouts from AURAS don’t just benefit from being beautiful—they promote more creative design and less chance of production mistakes that can cost time and money.
We make much more use of grids; master pages; character, paragraph and object style sheets; GREP; custom actions and color palettes than most studios (and we are asked to fix some files that are a nightmare). The result—better documents with built-in improvements in layout, typography and consistency.
Typography
Today the ability to manipulate fonts is nearly unlimited. Unfortunately, most designers have learned little about how to create great typography. Judicious application of letter and word tracking, kerning, leading and hyphenation make a huge difference in improving legibility and comprehension. We produce extensive variations to arrive at the most elegant and readable type—and bake them into the template’s style sheets.
AURAS InDesign templates are customized to maximize consistency and improve printing. We created a custom palette of CMYK builds that prevent moiré and improve type legibility.
Fonts
AURAS has made dozens of fonts in Fontographer and Font Lab that can be used just like any other font. Custom fonts for an organizational identity and dingbat fonts that add end bugs, logos or icons to use as part of typesetting to help effortlessly create unique elements for a project. The font on the homepage was created from two custom-altered fonts combined together into one new font. Here are a few other AURAS fonts we created to make our production life easier that you can try for yourself.
Click on the type samples at left to download these fonts. They are fully functional and free for you to use. The compressed file contains 5 fonts in Open Type format and a pdf file describing their creation and use. Enjoy!
Color Correction
Before photography went digital, we scanned and color-corrected thousands of photographs and transparencies to optimize their quality. Today, we still evaluate every image that goes to print regardless of its source to improve color and avoid printing issues. We even created a custom RGB-to-CMYK conversion formula to get the best color out of different printers.
Every so often we get some real challenges like this 70-year-old image. Sometimes the results are astounding. Move the handle to see what we did.
Portraits and cover images often need touching up. We always improve these images too. Check out this color correction.
Every image gets a thorough correction, but portraits get extra attention. How did we help Scarlett? Click on the image above for a detailed guide to correcting the original photograph.
Art & Photocollage
We enjoy creating artwork for our clients, and have art-directed hundreds of artists and photographers to help realize our ideas. We are no slouches using Photoshop ourselves, having worked with it for thirty years. One of our magazine clients relied on our editorial, photography and collage skills for nearly every cover of their publication.
Each month of Babaganewz, a magazine for Jewish tweens, had a different theme. AURAS came up with the cover concepts and, when approved, shot the photography and created the collage. Once a year, the Purim issue had a gag cover on the back. There are a couple of fun examples here. Click on the gallery to see the images larger. Oh, and this was all done fifteen years ago.
Every typeface in our documents is adjusted for tracking and leading for optimum readability. In these two examples the type is the same size. Click on the art to get a closer look. Which one would you want to read—the as-is setting or ours?
