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DOWNLOADS

You can learn a lot when you've been designing magazines for 20 years, and we've come up with lots of interesting ways to improve efficiency and quality. There are information and enhancements here that can help your publication too. To download the pdfs instead of viewing them, hold down the control key before selecting them.

Improving Your Publication

Using C/P/R to Revive Your Publication (14 MB file)
An annotated PDF of Rob Sugar's session from the Folio:Show in October, 2006. In this session, he demonstrated a new technique that compares your content against three benchmark ideals—servicing the reader COMMUNITY; delivering unmatched quality of PRODUCT presentation and review, and developing unique franchise content that is REFERENCE material only found in the publication.

Redesign Notes
An example of a focus group working paper, used inhouse to stimulate thinking on redesign and mission issues. Written for Food Management.

NEW! Precis
An example of a precis, written for Urban Land.

Self Critique
An evaluation form to fill out and rate your publication.

Mission Statement Form
A fill-in-the-blanks form to help create a mission statement for your publication.

Evaluation Worksheet
An example of a focus group working paper, used inhouse to stimulate thinking on redesign and mission issues.

NEW! Style Guide
An example style guide from Urban Land magazine. This document is a guideline for both designers and editors to use in producing the monthly issues.

NEW! Urban Land Magazine: The AURAS Redesign
A PDF of the Winter 2006 issue in its entirety. This file is about 15MB.

Free AURAS Fonts

A selection of FREE custom fonts designed by AURAS can be found here.

AURAS Specialties

Design Critique Example (PDF)
This is the formal design critique created for the magazine Habitat World.

Production Critique Example (PDF)
A critique of the Quark document construction for Habitat World.

Auras Redesigns
This 10-step process shows AURAS’ unique approach to redesign, and includes samples of our work. This is a slide presention and will load automoatically. To advance, click your mouse or use cursor keys; to exit, hit escape.

From the AURAS MasterClasses

UPDATED! XPress Yourself
Use QuarkXPress for 12 years and you learn a lot. Here are 25 ways to improve your efficiency, quality of product and creativity using this essential program.

Increase Your Magazine’s “Q”
Here’s how to make your publication matter more to your readers—and attract new readers from your competitors and even beyond your niche. This is a slide presention and will load automoatically. To advance, click your mouse or use cursor keys; to exit, hit escape.

Increase Your Magazine’s “Q” Notes
Notes from the AURAS Master Class on this subject.

Magazine Design: What Works and Why
Everything we've learned about magazine design condensed into three pages. One Folio:Show attendee said “It’s the most important session I’ve been to in my publishing career!”

The Ten-Step Magazine Self-Critique
This presentation shows you how to use the Ten Step Worksheet to do an in-house focus group that can improve your magazine. All important aspects of your editorial design and production are tested in this exercise. Many publishers have found this a great starting point for a redesign, but it has the extra benefit of improving staff enthusiasm.

Productivity

Photographer Guidelines 1.0
These guidelines are intended to assist photographers with optimizing their camera settings for taking pictures that yield the best image quality for use in your printed publication.

Free AURAS Fonts

UPDATED! Worksheet for Project Billing
A PDF for project billing that you can fill out on screen and print.

AURAS Color Palette for QuarkXPress

AURAS Color Palette for Adobe InDesign

Xtensions for Quark 6.5

QuarkXPress XTensions add powerful features to QuarkXPress. Many of our favorites are worthwhile purchases, but there are many available free. We’ve collected some of the free ones together here that will definitely make Quark work harder for you! (These are all for Quark XPress on the Mac) Download the whole group. Each XTension is in its own folder with instructions.

Badia DragNCopy XT 1.0
What Is It: Badia DragNCopy is a free XTension for Quark 6 that allows you to duplicate items by dragging and holding the Control key. You can now drag and copy single, multiple or grouped items interactively, without using a dialog. DragNCopy also remembers the last drag and copy operation, so you can generate additional copies of the last operation simply by pressing Command-D.

Badia PageFrame XT 1.0
What Is It: Badia PageFrame 1.0 is a free XTension that prints a frame around the page or spread. You can specify the width, color and style of the frame before printing.

Badia ReplaceInPlace XT 1.0.2
Badia ReplaceInPlace 1.0 is a free XTension that lets you retain previous picture attributes when importing an image into a picture box. Previous offset and scaling, for example, can be retained when replacing a low-res with a hi-res version of a picture. To use Badia ReplaceInPlace, choose“Get Picture” from the File menu and select “Retain Previous Picture Attributes” from the “ReplaceInPlace” tab.

Badia Vistas 1.5
Badia Vistas 1.5 is a free XTension for QuarkXPress™ that introduces a floating palette to help you quickly navigate through your document. It displays a color thumbnail of the active spread and incorporates several tools for handling views.

Badia OpenNow XT
Badia OpenNow XT is a free XTension that lets you double-click on any picture to access file information, with options for updating, revealing and opening the image with its creator application. Note: You should not use Badia OpenNow XT together with Quark’s EditOriginal QuarkXTension.

GLUON Outlines XT 2
Outlines XT is used to improve upon the handy feature added to QuarkXPress in version 4, “Text to Box.” Unlike the Quark function, GLUON Outlines allows you to convert multiple lines at once. Also, it places the resulting box as close as it can to the original location of the text and in the same color and shade as the selected text, too.

iViewXT 2.0
When you save a Quark document you will be presented with the iViewXT options dialog. Here you can choose whether to insert iView MediaPro metadata into the Quark document. iView MediaPro metadata contains information about your Quark document including page sizes, number of pages and page preview images. Documents that contain this metadata can be browsed by iView MediaPro.

Nudger 6.0
Nudger is a very simple XTension that presents a tiny palette for changing the nudge amount in QuarkXPress.

PageBorder XT 6.0
When proofing an ad, it can be difficult to judge the size and spatial layout of your document. With PageBorder XT, you can automatically print a border around a page or spread when you output a document from QuarkXPress. The border is used to indicate the edge of a layout for proofing on a larger piece of paper.

Ungroup All
Ungroup All is a very simple XTension that ungroups the currently selected group and all of its sub groups.

PSD Import 1.0
PSD Import 1.0 allows you to import native Adobe Photoshop files into QuarkXpress projects, and then manipulate teh layers, channels, and paths within those files. Adds the PSD Import palette and PSD Import Preferences dialog box to QuarkXPress.

Matrix XTensions
Includes Case Swapper (change the case of selected text), BatchEPS (convert all Quark documents inside a user specified folder into EPS files), ColorChanger (change the color and/or shade of text, text boxes and picture boxes across a document), DragAndDrop (drag and drop images and text directly into Quark from their Desktop, web browser etc. ), and Page2Pict (creates a preview of a Quark file at any size and stores it in the resource fork—ideal for digital asset or catalogue management systems).

Hi-Res Preview XTension
Allows the user to see high resolution previews in QuarkXPress.

More Quark 6.5 XTensions (Demo Versions)

Quark 4 XTensions

AUdience Winter 2007