[mnicole]

If anything - look at WordPress, Tumblr, Indexhibit/Cargo Collective and all of the other sites that rely heavily on themes. Spend a few seconds on Cargo Collective if you haven't and then think about all of the designers' portfolios you've seen that use that exact layout. Only reason you might not notice it off-the-bat is because the content is different and they're usually so minimal you think nothing of it.

Additionally, if you spend any time looking at the uploads to Dribbble, a lot of those layouts look similar to each other regardless of pre-existing templates simply because they needed to get something up fast or they just liked another person's concept so much that they took it and modified it just enough.

That being said, it'd take a few seconds to change that black bar to a brand color to make it look passably different.