So, I've been tinkering with responsive web design for the last 10 days.
It's not that difficult to pick up the concepts. In fact, HTML5 and CSS3 seem to be much easier and more semantic than past iterations ever were. Not that HTML was all that difficult to begin with. Throw in the Bootstrap framework and suddenly I'm feeling pretty accomplished!
Unfortunately, I'm noticing that all of the responsive and flat designs out there seem to look very similar to one another. It doesn't appear to be the fault of the tools. It seems like there's something else going on. I'm still an amateur at all of this responsive stuff, but am I the only one who's noticing the cookie cutter look?
It seems like designers are shying away from using images as design elements. Boxes don't have textured borders or gradients. Decorative image elements are few and far between. Images seem to stand alone... big, fat images that span the entire screen, or slideshows that highlight portfolio items.
Even logos on these websites are often text only. Selectable text provided by Google Fonts or Typekit... these aren't really logos in my opinion.
The better designed sites are the ones that use images to break free of the grid, or gracefully transcend it. Grid design is obviously beneficial to web development, but it doesn't have to be so obvious. Putting an image in a box doesn't mean that image has to look like a box. We can still make overlay images the same color as our backgrounds to create irregular or diagonal shapes, wave elements or textured borders. We can even allow those elements to scale so that they're responsive.
I'm going to try to create web designs that think outside the box. I'd like to respect the grid but not be restrained by it. Responsive design doesn't have to be boring.