This was the previous style for Charmed Designs and the third such design at the time (making this current one the fourth). The concept was to concentrate on the portfolio concept of the site, and present it as if it were a real ring bound portfolio.
However, as much as I like the aesthetic of this design, in practice it was a very difficult layout to work with. The small amount of vertical space available meant there was inevitably a lot of scrolling involved in much of the content and it kind of got in the way.
This is a shot of one of the content pages to give you a bit of an idea of how the site actually worked:
This design was also pre-dated by two incarnations of a previous design that never really got past the prototype phases, which you can see below. There’s not much to say on it as I was kinda turned off by how bland it looked with so little colour. I really liked the code background (re-used in the ring binder design on a new background) and ultimately is the one thing from both these designs that I kind of wish I’d been able to find a place for in this current one.
