OUR MISSION

At Carter Publishing Studio we have one clear mission: we design and compose high-quality print and digital magazines, journals, and books. Our clients—magazine and journal editors, publishers, association executives, communications managers, self-publishing authors, small business owners—count on us to turn almost anything we’re handed into well-crafted, great-looking pages, when they need it and within a reasonable budget. We're proud to claim the appellation "Midwestern Nice"; that's just one of the reasons we've served some of our clients for almost two decades.

OUR SERVICES

  • Publication design (book covers and interiors, magazines, journals, newsletters)

  • Publication layout and composition (print and ebook)

  • Document/template clean-up

“After more than a decade of association, Carter Publishing Studio continues to exceed my highest expectations. Laura is a highly skilled artist and personable professional, producing a quality product in a timely manner within a reasonable fee structure. I couldn’t be happier with what remains a strong partnership.”

—Richard D. Sjoerdsma, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Singing

OUR TEAM

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Laura Carter — Owner & President

Laura’s decades-long career as a typographer began entirely by accident, but she couldn't be happier that she stumbled into a professional niche that combines many of her passions—typography, design, the written word, and technology.

She took her first typesetting job at a newspaper during a break from college, and before long she realized that typography had become her true calling. She worked as a typesetter for printers, ad agencies, graphic arts studios, and newspapers just before desktop publishing burst onto the scene in 1984, totally revolutionizing the fields of typesetting and graphic design. Varityper typesetting systems and light tables gave way to Macintosh computers running desktop publisher software—PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and finally InDesign—and Laura loved keeping pace with the rapidly evolving technology and workflows. Even so, she will always measure pages in picas and points rather than inches, and she still yearns for a whiff of hot wax every now and then.

Laura spent much of the 1990s managing the typesetting department at a busy Midwestern publication printer, the Ovid Bell Press. It was there that she learned all about magazine and journal layout, prepress, and the printing process, and she guided her department's evolution from traditional journal typesetting into electronic prepress. 

When the OBP phased out the typesetting department in 1997, Laura decided it was time to start her own publication design and layout business. Originally known as Carter Document Services, Inc., her company continued to provide journal composition services to many of the same publishers and associations she'd been serving for years, some of whom remain her clients 23 years later. The company's name was changed to Carter Publishing Studio in 2005. After more than two decades in business, Carter Publishing Studio, Inc., offers the full range of creative publishing services for print and digital platforms. With a small but talented staff, CPS turns out thousands of pages every year, creating books, magazines, journals, and newsletters to be read on paper, tablets, or computers.

“Laura Carter of Carter Publishing Studio thinks like a publisher! Her concern about quality and her attention to detail is unparalleled. Composition and book design have always been strengths of the company, and we have been pleased with our close working relationship since 1997. Producing eBooks has been added to the repertoire of services, with terrific results. If you want a quality educational product that matches your company image, I highly recommend Carter Publishing Studio.”

— Nancy Collins, Greenbranch Publishing

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Regina Troyer — GRAPHIC ARTIST

Regina is a graphic arts professional, and has worked in both creative design and technical print production since 1993. She loves to intuit solutions to problems and bring order to chaos. Skills include:

  • Publication design and layout (books, covers, catalogs, journals, magazines, workbooks, forms, ads, brochures)

  • Image correction and compositing (combining several images into one, altering an image to suit a situation, removing/replacing unwanted elements, and so forth)

  • Web banners

  • Product illustration

  • Charts/maps/tables/graphs/flow diagrams

  • Logo creation

Additionally, her experiences living and traveling outside the US have given her a well-rounded world view. In her free time she paints, cares for 6 cats, and builds anything and everything out of wood.