Modern Responsive design examples
Ning To Jamroom
I have some work done on a skin and the way I handle placeholder boxes, is to make them part of the skin settings, but this can get messy too.
But please bare in mind there are some wonderful WP and HTML themes out there but once you get into buddypress, although they are better than JR's, they still lack the diversity of the WP themes. Since JR, Buddypress, PhpFox etc are networks users expect information to be presented in a certain way, and this puts certian constraints on how you design your skin. Each page will typical have to be 2 or 3 columns, with blocks and lists.
What makes some of the themes above so nice is the no padding between elements, which allows the colours, pics etc all to flow seamless together. You could do that sort of thing to your homepage rather easy but your inner pages will have to follow a predictable path for users.
Each JR module gives you a simple full width list, with a search box at the top as default, if you want anything more, then you have to really work hard to achieve it. The problem with off the shelf skins is, short of including 5 templates for every page to show variation, there will be no way to cater for more than 10 or 15 sites. This in turn then has a direct effect on how much work a designer can put into a skin and still make it at least breakeven never mind profitable.
I don't know what the solution, but JR already gives you the tools to do a ksin like those mentioned, you're just gonna need a very good understanding off the system and css.