I spent some time working on this, which is good in that you really get to see some of the things you come up against when testing a cool new design concept.
For example, and this is evident in the original post’s example, what is supposed to happen on iOS devices… the prime reason we have Responsive design? There is no easy way to get a touch device to reveal the hidden text (no hovering) so the reveal is only for desktops (well, laptops too but I think we can all agree they are all the same thing now, right?)
In the original example, the whole tile acts like a link to a page about the image. The iOS crowd is expected to just divine how that works-- which I suppose is an arguable expectation. I guess that non-tech-savvy users are the new legacy Windows browser users and we can get away with ignoring them too.
Couple that with the way the image tiles are presentationally devoid of text in the first place, and you can see that search engine friendliness begins a page further on. I suppose that is not completely horrible as every page is a landing page to a search engine.
None of this actually invalidates the showy nature of image tiles… I think it only underscores the difficulties they present when using them.
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