Since we've been building all our sites with a mobile first, RWD approach (love @malarkey's 320andUp!!), I've found the more tangible, textured and graphically heavy aesthetic has been a lot harder to scale up, as well as being frankly inappropriate across screen sizes.

I've found (for myself at least), that the move to design in the browser and (rightly so) focus on content and cut out the excess has lead to site designs that have the danger of becoming dull and lacking the "wow" factor that previously would've borrowed heavily on a very visually rich style.

Have other people found this, and how have you overcome it?

This isn't really a Responsive Design question, more of a web design question.

I've never been happy with the visual-first then sign-off approach to web design and when i joined an agency in 2009 this just didn't work because it was slowing down our process. I rapidly started designing in the browser and personally this is where I am happiest designing (and I would hope that the outcome isn't too bland) but it doesn't work for everyone.

The real problem is that we lack a sophisticated enough tool set to achieve what we can with photoshop but more fundamentally the process that we have been selling (design > build > ship) needs redressing as the design phase itself is much more of an ongoing discovery of marrying content and context.

Sorry, was a waffly way of saying that I don't think there is a danger/problem with RWD being bland but there is a problem with 1) our toolset for achieving this, 2) the processes that underly how we design for the web (especially in agency setting) and 3) (predominantly) visual designers migrating their existing approaches from designing to a fixed size to designing for a range of different viewport sizes or devices.

We had this when 960 grids first came out hence the adage "give a designer a grid framework and you feed his family for a week, teach them why they are using grids in the first place and you feed them for life"

;)

Yep - I can completely see that - I recently wrote a blog on the move from the traditional agency / print design model to a more flexible, adaptive process here - moogaloo.com .

I was never convinced that RWD itself is specifically to blame for dull websites, but it did make me sit up and think is it part of the problem, and if so, how to overcome it.

I think for me (or Moogaloo in general) as having come from a place of loving Photoshop for the level of detail that I can access when creating very visually / graphically intensive websites and moving to an approach that turns that on it's head, I need to rethink how I can still access that part of the process since moving to a mobile first and a design in the browser approach.

This is exactly the same argument/concern people had when standards based development started to take off.

Many of the original standards pioneers were focused on solving the technical/idealogical challenges, so the early sites lacked finess. However once people mastered the technology and techniques, these new constraints ended up stimulating creativity rather than stifling it.

So let's not mix correlation with causality. Just because some early attempts at responsive design lack finess, doesn't mean that responsive web design causes bland or restrained sites.

But a great bit of trolling so I applaud the instigator of this thread.

@andy Yes, I think that articulately sums up what I imagine are largely teething troubles of any new approach / technology.

It's certainly tempting, when one has developed a pleasing, simple, clear design that works on a range of devices to call it a day and leave the 'desktop' display rather spartan. Sometimes that is all that is possible within the scope of the project: it's as much as you can do to develop a basic responsive site within time and budgetary constraints.

As Andy Budd says the current situation is very similar to that when standards-based design started to take off. We were so pleased to get something that worked on a technical level that spending the extra time necessary to create an intriguing design often took a back seat.

I think we'll begin to see much more originality as designers understand better and begin to master RWD techniques.

And therein lies our challenge - adopting and embracing a newer technologies without it negatively affecting the output of our work.

To some extent, in the short term this may be true. There's good reason. If you're looking at truly mobile/NVP first then people generally are having to think far more about what they send to the client and so performance becomes a big deal (really it should always have been).

There's actually a massive shift for designers that don't code to really embrace what flexibility means. Obviously that's another really general statement but in many that have been locked into Photoshop for all their days thinking about the flexibility of these components of the screens they're designing and reflow is new and will take time.

Doesn't mean it has to be bland but I can understand that with some many challenges it takes experience...

In many ways it's forcing us to push back against a lot of reasonably long held practices and find new ways of working, which are evolving all the time. Some of that can be harder to embrace for some people/organisations.

It's a fun time and if we can learn to walk and get really sound well thought out sites that fundamentally do a good job of communicating with people we can always hone and improve our response to what RWD means.

To me, RWD is a stepping stone. How we do it will no doubt change but so will the landscape we cater for.

Excellent points there - I've turned it into a post on our Moogaloo blog here - moogal.me

Personally, I've not been in the industry long enough to have experienced the Standard movement first-hand but I'm very excited to see how the RWD thing pans out - seeing a site scale up and down is an addictively fun thing to do!

I was actually initially trained up in a very print heavy agency where they still do 100% of their site designs as meticulously created Photoshop files for client sign off before they even touch a browser. That approach I've completely left for dead!