We've been through a lot over the past year. We acquired Pattern Tap and Forrst. We released our Product Design Suite. We moved to a brand new building. It was a time of change, but we didn't want to lose ourselves. It was time to regroup and fully understand who we are as a company.

We believe in Design with a capital 'D.' After endless conversations, pages of notes and whiteboards full of sketches, we set down our ideas into the newly evolved ZURB.com.

We had to hone our brand so that it told a much larger, more cohesive story about who we had become over the past 15 years. Recently, we told you about how our footer changed to meet the evolving needs of our business, reflecting our four pillars: Services, Foundation, Product and Expo. That had to carry across our sites and into ZURB.com.

Evolving Our Brand and Reaffirming Who We Are

This year, we celebrate our 15th...
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Step aside, Antique Roadshow, cause ZURB's going on the road this month and next. We're not just going on a national tour. We're also travelling across the globe. So batten down the hatches, store all the breakables, cause ZURB is coming to town. And we don't want anyone to miss out.

Here's a rundown of where we'll be speaking in the next few weeks.

ConvergeSE

On April 26, 2013, Design Lead and Partner Jonathan Smiley will speak at ConvergeSE in beautiful Columbia, SC. He'll be part of the three-day event. He'll not only speak about responsive design, but he'll also talk about how and why we went Mobile First with Foundation 4.

Register for ConvergeSE

Code PaLOUsa 2013

We didn't want Design Lead Chris Michel to feel left out, so we're sending him to the Blue Grass state for Code PaLOUsa in Louisville, KY on April 25 to April 27, 2013. So if you'll be in the area...
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You can tell a lot about the health of a business from its footer. Sounds crazy? But it isn't. Our footer has and continues to evolve along with our business.

Think about it. Your footer is the last stop on your page, where you can snare the attention of visitors before they bounce somewhere else. What goes into it says a lot about how you want to connect with your viewers, or how you want them to connect with you. And as you grow and change, so must your footer. Here's how we've changed our footer over the years to meet the needs of our evolving business.

Reflecting Changes

Our footer didn't change too much from 2008 to 2012. We were in a good place and we felt comfortable about who we were at the time. Check out our footer from 2008:

It's very basic. We emphasized our contact information: phone, email and signup for the newsletter. At the time, we were...
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It's been a couple of weeks since we released our Job Board out into the wild. We learned some valuable lessons on hiring product designers from it. And we continue to learn more as we go. We mentioned during our launch that we did a survey asking designers what they did not want in a job. Today, we want to share our final findings.

We've worked with many designers over the past 15 years, learning what drove them. But we dug deeper whilst putting together our Job Board. We did an initial survey on what they were exactly looking for in a job and found the following made them happy:

1. Passionate co-workers.
2. The type of projects they worked on.
3. A strong company culture.
4. A flexible work schedule.
5. A company with vision and goals.

We followed up with another survey of 80 designers. And they gave us what turned them off in a job. Here's what we they said.

1. Designers...
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We get asked by a lot of companies if we can recommend someone who is trained in the Yeti ways of Foundation. But up until now we haven't really had an academy for Foundation acolytes. We do our best on a daily basis to help others get started with our responsive framework, answering questions via email or Twitter. But that's not real concrete, structured training. Which is why we're happy to announce our new classes that aim to get teams up and running with Foundation quickly.

Our introductory online class is implementation-focused and you'll learn the fundamentals of using Foundation, from the grid to prototyping to our Javascript plugins. The classes are taught by the very designers and engineers behind Foundation, who you'll get to interact with. No previous experience with Foundation is needed, but you'll want to have a basic understanding of HTML and...
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We're continuing to fill space in our new building (more on that soon). And we're even filling it with people. Two new ZURBians have joined our ranks. So without further ado, let's introduce our newest teammates.

Brad Wrage, Designer

Brad has the awesomest last name we've heard in awhile. You can say it's all the (W)rage! All kidding aside, Brad joins us as our newest Designer. He originally hails from the Central Coast, where he got plenty of sunshine and hit the beach quite often, gaining an appreciation for the outdoors. Which is why he chose to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo instead of moving far away for college.

Whilst in college, he started designing and building websites, both for fun and to keep his pantry full. He knew that design was his calling after an internship at a San Francisco startup. He toiled at a large tech company before finding his way to...
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We're currently plowing through projects where we're going completely Mobile First and learning a lot about mobile-specific interactions. Building those interactions can spark engagement for products across many devices. This is one of the many reasons we completely rewrote Foundation 4 to be Mobile First. But what if you already have a product? Do you need to rebuild it, like we had for Foundation? Do you need to start from scratch?

Absolutely not! It is possible to bring a mobile-first strategy into your existing products by building specific interactions. Just as we have with our app, Notable, when we created its new feature NotableGo. We didn't rebuild Notable from scratch for mobile. Instead, we built a mobile-first component within it.

Tap into your Mobile-First Potential

We've recently wrote that your emails should be an extension of your app, providing...
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You asked for it, and you got it! Foundation 4 was our biggest release yet, but we focused on the core pieces of the mobile-first grid and all the awesome new features. Once we had that pinned down, we rolled up our sleeves and started working on refining right-to-left support for our next release with fully functional RTL javascript.

Right-to-left support is back in Foundation 4.1 and it's better than ever! Not only did we bring back the ability to download a right-to-left version of Foundation using our handy customizer, but we also sprinkled in some Javascript sorcery to get all the plugins running smoothly for any text direction.

Don't worry, this is still the same Foundation, so you won't have to change your workflow. If you downloaded the static CSS version, everything will work in exactly the same way. If you installed Foundation using the gem, there...
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In the CSS justice system, the designers are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. The design community who lay the foundation for the future and the users who prosecute semantic offenders. These are their stories.

We love product design at ZURB, but we've always had a passion for creating quality television. For the past several months, we have been working hard at putting together a series that will have it all ' drama, crime and, of course, CSS.

That's why we're ecstatic to introduce you all to "LOL & ORDER: CSS," our first hour-long crime drama. A series so good that we had to release every season at once on DVD. (Yeah, take that "House of Cards".)

On the set with Ryan Riddle as Detective Sass & Matthew Kelly as Cop #104E8B

You can check out the DVD set and get your own copy on the hottest new home shopping channel, ZVC, which is...
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The last few Soapbox speakers that we've had have all spoken in someway about how it's important to get your story straight. We often chat about story around ZURB. Mostly, it's about telling the ongoing story that we've built over the course of the past 15 years and how we can do that better. That is try to find stronger ways to explain who we are, where we come from and what we stand for.

Recently, we ran across a New York Times article that broke down how important storytelling is to the morale of a family. And what is a company but another kind of family? What really caught our eye was this little bit:

... if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones.

Think about it for a second. It's more than just retelling that story, it's about refining it....
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