A few weeks ago, the insanely talented people at Information Architects released a new, semi-responsive design, augmenting their already lovely site with a flexible grid, and some media queries to optimize their design for smaller resolutions. On the higher end of the resolution spectrum, they fell back to an em-based, fixed-width layout. Given the combination of flexible and fixed-width layouts, I felt it was a great example of a partially responsive design, and I said as much on Twitter.

Let’s consider an example design. I’ve built a simple page for a hypothetical magazine; it’s a straightforward two-column layout built on a fluid grid, with not a few flexible images peppered throughout. As a long-time proponent of non-fixed layouts, I’ve long felt they were more “future proof” simply because they were layout agnostic. And to a certain extent, that’s true: flexible designs make no assumptions about a browser window’s width, and adapt beautifully to devices that have portrait and landscape modes.