Aleberry Creative

The Bridge School offers flexible online curriculum for middle & high school students. Their mission “is to enable students to become self-motivated, independent learners.” It’s a great option for students who need an alternative to traditional schools.

As part of a larger marketing campaign (via Marketing Refresh), The Bridge School needed a website revamp to attract new students. As a school, their funding for web design was limited. Instead of reworking the entire website, we focused on a complete overhaul of the Home page. 

DesignBigger did an great job of moving the site over to WordPress and using our Home page design as a base for the other page templates.

The Home page needed to target the various types of students who may require an alternative school, showcase their features, and most importantly — provide a call to action front and center. We designed the website to look both professional and academic, so parents feel comfortable enrolling their children.

Check out the before and after website design of TheBridgeSchool.net:

We wanted the school to maintain a consistent brand image, especially across online media. To supplement their marketing collateral, we also designed a couple online advertisements, a Facebook cover design, and a email marketing template (using MailChimp). 

This project is a great example of how a professional, custom website design for academic institutions can be great for marketing and overall brand image. 

We just received some exciting news from HOW magazine!

For non-industry folks, HOW is a go-to magazine for designers & creatives. They regularly feature articles on business, resources, technology, and creativity.

Aleberry Creative Group has been featured on their “Top 10 Websites for Designers” for this coming month (June 2012).

You can check us out at spot #2 right here:

HOW Magazine - Top 10 Websites for Designers - June 2012

We’re alongside some pretty great international talent!

We also get a cool badge, which we’ll need to place on our site.

Thanks HOW!

We’re growing up! This month, Aleberry Creative Group turned three years old. 

We’ve had an exciting year full of new clients, projects, and being featured by Adobe! Aleberry designed on newer platforms, including designing reports in Word, and focused on becoming more involved in our community.

We’ve had a great time meeting local entrepreneurs through great groups like GroundUP Houston, Social Media Breakfast Houston, and Open Coffee Club. If you love Houston as much as we do, these groups are worth checking out. We can’t thank the people we’ve met at these events enough for their support.

On the client front, Aleberry added new options to work with your various needs. Our Outsourced Design Department (ODD) serves companies who require multiple design projects on a monthly basis. It’s also great for companies who need an in-house designer (or department), but don’t quite have the resources for one. 

This coming year, we look forward to giving back to the Houston community that has given us so much. (#SLGT Always)

Thank you all for your support & referrals! We look forward to building new relationships and strengthening old ones!

Yesterday, Facebook rolled out their latest update, called timeline, for everyone, including brands.

Although Facebook has changed their layout multiple times since its initial, college-students-only years, the latest update is the most different. The most visual change is the new cover image that spans the top of your page.

As a brand, it’s important to maintain a consistent visual identity across all media platforms. What’s great about the new cover feature is it allows you to do just that. Your company can tell their story in a visually interesting way at the top of the page.

We’ve been busy designing cover images over the past few weeks. We’ve picked up a few tips and restrictions to keep in mind.

TIPS FOR A GOOD LOOKING TIMELINE:

Make sure your cover image works with your profile picture. Your profile picture will now show up as a square that covers part of the cover. Both items sit closely together, so have a little fun. 

Make sure your profile picture looks good as a square. Although you can adjust the thumbnail view, visitors are not likely to click through your image. Keep it simple with a company logo. When you edit the thumbnail view, you can check “Fit to Scale” to make sure your logo isn’t cut off.

Get the right dimensions. Even though Facebook does pixelate the image, your cover should still look good. Design a cover that works as a horizontal image. Make sure to upload a hi-res file.

Tell a story and express your company’s style. Make sure your brand page matches your company’s branding. This your chance to tell your story and engage your audience as soon as they hit your page. 

FACEBOOK COVER DIMENSIONS:

Cover images are 851 x 315.

Profile picture thumbnails are 132 x 132 with a 1px solid border. 

Personal pages and brand pages have different measurements in relation to where the profile picture sits on top of the cover image.

On brand pages: The profile picture sits about 22 pixels to the left, and 72 pixels up.

On personal pages: The profile picture sits about 22 pixels to the left, and 92 pixels up.

FACEBOOK COVER IMAGE RULES & RESTRICTIONS

These are important things to keep in mind. You don’t want to waste time or money having a cover image designed only to get your Facebook account suspended.

• No price or purchase information, including discounts or coupons.
• No contact information. This includes websites, addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc. Keep all this in your About section.
• No references to Facebook features, such as “Like” or “Share”. No arrows point from the cover to any of these.
• No calls to actions (“Get it now” or “Tell your friends”)
• It may not be false, deceptive, or misleading. It must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property. Make sure you own the images, or at least have a right to use them.

Now for the fun part! Here are a few of our designs.

We used our cover to be creative and tell our story on painless perceived legitimacy. We also added a bit of a shadow around where the thumbnail profile picture was. 

A take on the classic typewriter keys for a creative copywriting, GlobalWrites.

We wanted to showcase all the aspects this marketing agency, Marketing Refresh, offers. This is one great way to tell your company’s story.

A great local band, Castle Lights, wanted to feature their recent tunes.

For more details on the latest Facebook update, check out Facebook’s Guide.

We have been receiving quite a few emails asking us how we setup a blog on our Adobe Muse site. 

Unfortunately, we can’t give many of you Musers-to-be the easy step-by-step answer you were hoping for. We actually had a fantastic developer (DesignBigger) help us with this. 

We originally used Arbitrary HTML / an iframe of our Tumblr blog. This is one option. It just doesn’t look great on a site.

DesignBigger actually helped us create a WordPress blog that looked like our site, and set it up on our domain. 

Hope that answers any questions.

UBIFRANCE (the French Trade Commission) contacted us to design print media for a couple upcoming events.

Les Champagnes de Vignerons hosts trade-only events for buyers across the United States. 

Our not-so-secret love for all things French & wine made this a perfect project for us.

We were able to have some fun with typography on this flyer. UBIFRANCE have been a great client, allowing us some creative freedom.