About 45th Parallel Design
Company History
We are a creative design and development shop established in 2011 by Nicole Aue and Megan Ferrell. Realizing our unique skill sets are many times more valuable in combination than alone, we decided to team up to offer a diverse array of branding, design, marketing, e-learning, and web development services to businesses and organizations.
What's Unique About Us?
We’re a Full-Service, One-Stop Shop for Your Design and Development Needs.
We’ve got a lot of tools in our toolkit: brand identity design including idea generation, logos, and business cards; information architecture design and wireframing; user interface design; website design and development; search engine optimization; website maintenance, backups, and security monitoring; e-learning design and development; copy editing, hosting plan recommendations and management, and more.
Our Designs Are Custom: No Templates!
We professionally design every project, from logos to websites, from scratch to ensure it is truly customized and branded just for you. Unlike many other “creative” shops, we won’t ever build publications or websites by inserting your logo and images into pre-configured templates. We listen to your specific needs and implement smart solutions to your project requirements.
We Have 10+ Years of Experience in Design and Development
With experience in both the public and private sector, we’ve amassed an array of skills to manage and implement a wide variety of projects with aplomb, from billboard design to large custom websites.
We Give You Peace of Mind With Full-Service, Ongoing Website Maintenance
Want to spend less time updating your website and more time doing what you do best? That’s where we come in to help out. We can maintain every aspect of your website from text edits to design changes to running security updates and regular backups.
We Can Help You Make the Right Decisions With Our Professional Advice
Not sure how many pages your website should have or what content should go where? We can help with that. Not sure which platform to choose for your email marketing? We can help with that too. Not only can we make recommendations for improving your brand, your website, your online courses, etc. – we also implement those recommendations and stick around to maintain them.
We Stay Up-To-Date With Current Standards
We practice user-centered design. The websites we build are responsive to different screen sizes, are optimized for page load speed, and are designed with accessibility in mind. Our websites utilize clean code for easy perusal by search engines so your website will be recognized by Google and Bing. We work with you to implement a search-engine friendly information architecture, and a user interface that is appealing to your audience and helps increase conversions.
Quality and Consistency Are Our Top Priorities
We take care with the details, like ensuring consistency in alignment, fonts, colors, and repeated design elements. We can help you keep your content organized, logical, and clean. We’re also hawks when it comes to cleaning up errors. When we see a typo in your copy, we make the simple effort to fix it.
Got a question? Schedule a conversation with us!
Meet the Owners
Nicole Aue: Designer
Nicole Aue is a professional designer with 13+ years of experience presenting audiences with effective visual cues, logical hierarchy, and inviting imagery to facilitate engagement with her clients’ intended message. Nicole is concerned with creating quality, standards-based products – both print and electronic – focused on usability, content, and information. She is skilled in conceiving original brand identities with visual interest. As a consumer who prizes quality goods and services, Nicole also makes quality a top priority in her own production. In service of quality, she frequently attends to the unglamorous but important behind-the-scenes details, such as proper organization, keyword optimization of web pages, and metadata optimization of documents for improved readability and accessibility for humans as well as better placement in search engine results. A native Portlander, Nicole is a Portland State University graduate.
Megan Ferrell: Developer
Megan Ferrell is a professional web developer and search engine optimization (SEO) consultant with 10+ years of experience working at Portland-area web hosting companies as well as 10 years as co-owner of 45th Parallel Design. Megan has worked on hundreds of websites over the course of her career. Her knowledge extends beyond custom coding and includes website security and experience with server administration. Megan has developed a reputation for tenacity and troubleshooting prowess among her clients as well as other developers and server administrators. She grew up in Southern California and is a University of California, San Diego graduate.