Today, we launched the new Pattern Tap with code patterns. Since acquiring the site last year, we've been adding new patterns to the library everyday and learning from how people use it. It's exciting to expand on Matthew Smith's vision and introduce code patterns to the library. It's an amazing resource.

Introducing Code Patterns

The new code patterns will help product designers use Foundation more effectively in their workflow. The code patterns are great for prototyping and building responsive websites. The introduction of code patterns came as an evolution of the success of our templates on Foundation, an add-on page that quickly became one of the most popular pages within ZURB's network. We're excited about the possibilities and look forward to evolving the site.

The new Pattern Tap fits nicely into our Expo, a resource for product designers to learn, practice and get inspired. This is just one step in our effort to build an awesome education service. We've got a lot of pieces in front of us to refine, but we're up for the task of making the Expo amazing.

Patterns, Expo and ZURB, Oh My!

We recently released the new ZURB.com. It paints a better picture of our evolving business and how we help our customers. As a service-based business, we've been working hard to provide valuable tools, open-source software and training to help our customers we work with get better at people-focused product design. It's a monumental effort for a small team of 25 who are helping the entire globe, but we're nimble, passionate and ambitious.

The Expo is the newest addition to ZURB. It's been evolving over the last four years and it's taken a form that our fans and customers can now appreciate. Product design education has been lacking and we intend to push the boundaries to help companies and students of design grow. The internet needs bright minds to shape its future and ZURB wants to lead this charge.

Building Our Company, ZURB

So what's the thinking behind this effort? Why not just provide consulting services?

It's no longer possible to be successful providing product design services online without thinking about the evolving needs of our customers. Things move too quickly online. Too many devices. Too many variables. Delivering a finished "design" or "UX specs" to a client isn't realistic as the work needs to continually evolve based on customer insights and analytics. Staying stuck in the mindset of a traditional design-services business won't work anymore.

What this means for ZURB:

• We have the opportunity to provide top notch product design services on top of our Foundation framework — while also continuing to support our customers in a touch-and-go relationship, where we can prototype for them using our framework. And with a framework that millions of users interface with, it's a solid bet.
• We can work through prototyping ideas with Solidify, iterate quickly, test those ideas and teach our customers to prototype long after we've engaged with them on a project. When clients come back, we can re-engage at a higher level. Our clients now have access to the same specialized tools we use. Our product design suite continues to get better every day.
• In the process of working through a project, customers will eventually need to hire employees to own our work that we've completed together. And that often involves teaching existing employees ways to solve the same problems we run into every day or helping them connect with our like-minded audience of product designers.

We're approaching our services as more than a one-shot deal, where we continue to work with our customers in an evolving way. We can also help others that aren't always a fit for our services. It's awesome to think about all the possibilities of helping our customers get better at product design!

Pattern Tap is a Great Design Tool

With the updated version of Pattern Tap, it's another tool in our larger toolbox to help designers learn how to build websites and products. It's our hope that designers will continue to use it, like our other tools, as a resource as they grow their skills. If you've got feedback or ideas on making Pattern Tap better, reach out to us at patterntap@zurb.com!

Since the release of Foundation 4, we've had people asking us to update the Foundation 3 stencils to the latest version of our framework. Well, we heard you and now we present the new and improved stencil sets, now Foundation 4 ready!

When we created the stencil sets for the first time, we knew it would help us produce wireframes and mock-ups faster. This is one of the reasons we decided to update the stencils to the latest version of our framework. We also want to make sure that everyone using Foundation 4 is also able to build faster and better layouts.

What's New in This Version of the Stencils, You Ask?

Well, we added tons of goodness in this new version of the stencils!

You can find all of the elements from the previous version of the stencils plus a whole bunch of new goodies that you can use to create your awesome wireframes and mockups for your projects.

Checkout some of the new hotness we included:

• Switch
• Custom Forms
• V-Cards
• Progress Bars
• Pricing Tables
• Sections
• Thumbnails & Placeholders

Pretty cool, right!? Ready to start creating great wireframes that you can use on your projects that look awesome and saves you tons of time? Check the OmniGraffle and .PDF stencils on our playground page, download 'em and wireframe away!

Get the Stencils Today!

Today, we came across this tweet from a ZURB fan that made us smile:

@zurb is working hard today to make the world of tomorrow a beautiful place.

— Joseph Gagliardi (@ProfessaurusG) April 24, 2013

We don't like to toot our horn too much, but it's nice to see when others recognize what we do day in and day out is all working toward building a better tomorrow. We do that through our services, our responsive framework Foundation or the training on the Expo. We want to educate and help others to use Design, with a capital "D", to make that world a reality. And as gratifying it is to read tweets like this one, it's also wonderful to see others striving to do the same thing. Which is why we're happy to announce that the awesome folks over at Moovweb are sponsoring our educational and training content.

Remix the Web

Moovweb, a software platform that transforms desktop sites for mobile, also realizes that mobile is a thing and that it isn't going away. They take sites that don't work for mobile and make them work. You could say they're remixing the web. It's how they're building that better mobile tomorrow. One of the other ways they do that is through their mobile hackathon with $5,000 in prizes.

This month, they're asking other savvy designers and engineers to redesign Github to be mobile-friendly. They've even set up a virtual office hours to help folks should they need a little help. There's even a template to help you get started. They're knee-deep into their hackthon now, but it's not too late to join.

Join Moovweb's Remix Hackathon

Yesterday, we told you about evolving our site. It's only natural as a business grows and changes that it also grows its team. We've been in a bit of a growth spurt this past year, adding a few new ZURBians to the mix. You might have noticed a few new faces on our site. Today, we want to introduce you to the newest member of our family!

Without further ado, here's ...

Kurt Varner, Designer

Kurt, as he put it, was humbly created in a small Pennsylvania town. But he tired of small town living and jumped to the big city, where he earned a degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. The Air Force brought him out to Los Angeles so he could be a flight test engineer. But none of us have the security clearance to know exactly what he did.

However, Kurt didn't stick around the military for too long and soon found himself on the roller coaster of entrepreneurialism. He took a lean-startup approach and once lived in his own car as he toiled to launch a business, which got him an article in Inc. Magazine. If you ask, he'll tell you the story. At the end of his rollar coaster ride, he landed at ZURB and joined us as our latest Designer.

When he's not working here, he's spending time with his wife — the most amazing woman in the world. Oh, and don't worry, he's no longer living in his car.

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 birthday. We're still "design for people" at our very core after all these years. People are at the heart of what we do, how we design. We're not just designing pretty pixels, we're designing products that are meant to be used and solve problems for people. It's a large part of who we are. Our brand had to reflect that.

It had to be:

• Conversational
• Colorful
• And have lots of personality

Because that's also who we are. We're a bit nerdy, quirky, fun and practical. We infused that across the new site. There are bold, bright photos of people, of us. Our voice is conversational, we're always talking with you not at you. No corporate speak here. Of course, we also have personality. Just look at our benefits page — it even has a picture of Britney Spears making it rain.

Streamlining the Visual Style

People who see our website aren't just browsing a collection of pages. They're seeing who we are and what we're about. Part of that was really bringing consistency across our 30-some properties. We'd noticed many styles spread among those properties.

To unify our style, we went with a minimalistic, flat look that would make the different properties unique while belonging to the same family. We even developed our own icons to set the style we were looking for.

Lessons Learned Using Foundation 4

It's no secret that iterating is big in our process. For this iteration of our site, we used Foundation 4 to do more than just build something that worked across all devices. We also wanted to test the waters of the latest version of our framework.

We're about moving forward, and that means leaving IE8 behind. And since it only accounted for 0.8% of our total traffic, we were fine with that. In the next few weeks, we'll revisit IE8 to ensure that we can create overrides to make everything look pretty normal, and then see what we can use for our clients who still have several customers using that browser. We'll share during the next release of Foundation.

Also, helping the site to cater to the iPad's 768px viewport was a lot harder than we anticipated. Forcing ourselves to address the problem lead to an elegant solution: we scaled down the text to just the right size and updated the navigation and footer to scale properly.

More of an Evolution Than a Redesign

We made our last major redesign to ZURB.com about a year ago. With this evolution, the website now serves as an umbrella for our business and helps people figure out where they needed to go. Its goals haven't changed, but the new ZURB.com better suits what we've learned and how we've grown.

We believe in Design with a capital 'D' more than ever. We wanted the new site to show people what we're about. But in updating ZURB.com, we came to understand how we've grown as a company. When you explore the site, you're learning who we are.

The evolved design says what we mean: Hi, we're ZURB. Nice to meet you again. :)

Visit ZURB.com

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 CSS. Each lesson is 45 minutes long with 15 minutes at the end for any questions you might have.

There will be two sessions. On Monday, April 22, we'll go over the basics of Foundation. We'll talk about Sass in our session on Wednesday, April 24.

Here's the nitty gritty:

What: Introductory classes to Foundation

When: Monday, April 22, 2013 (Foundation basics) and Wednesday, April 24, 2013 (Sass)

Where: Attend from anywhere, streamed directly from the Yeti cave in Campbell, Ca

Sign Up Today!

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 ZURB. When he's not poring over design, he's playing guitar or exploring the outdoors.

Ben Gremillion, Writer

Ryan, our Lead Editor, was getting a bit lonely so we found him a writer to keep him company. Ben, who also has an awesome last name, started his career in newspaper and magazine design, but quickly saw a future in the digital realm. He learned HTML, which has since become like a first language to him.

Gradually, as he puts it, he came to see design as a place to solve problems in communication. And he started writing articles on the side to better understand the differences between digital and analog design. He eventually found himself working as the art department of a startup yellow page company. He also moonlighted as a Photoshop instructor in Texas before hoping over to New Zealand to work at a startup. Through it all, he kept writing and now he's pounding the keys for us!

So everyone please give a warm welcome to our new ZURBians!

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 will be a couple of adjustments that you'll want to make to your markup and SCSS before you get going. These changes are fully documented in both our Foundation Docs and the newfangled Right-to-Left Foundation Playground page.

Oh yes, we added the full documentation for right-to-left support in the 4.1 release, so it's super easy to get your setup instructions from the Foundation Docs.

Right-to-Left for Foundation 4 on the Playground

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 owned and operated by ZURB. Yep, we do it all..

Visit ZVC to purchase LOL & ORDER: CSS

Today, we're excited to finally unleash our Job Board out into the wild. For the past year-and-a-half, we've talked to folks about how incredibly hard it is to hire great product design talent. It's thrilling to be able to finally launch our Job Board and expose companies to our network of 450,000 product designers, including those on Forrst and Pattern Tap.

With our listings viewed over 6 million times, we knew it was time to flip the switch and let this puppy loose. But we needed the private release to figure out what it really took to hire a product designer or engineer. We learned some valuable lessons and we wanted to share those with you.

1. Designers Want to Work With Passionate Co-Workers

We really looked into what entices a potential candidate during our private release. After all, we'd been on the hiring side when it came to brining on new ZURBians. What makes a candidate passionate about working for a company? What draws them in? More than that, what will sustain them when their workload is heavy and they have pressing deadlines?

We knew from experience what drove our designers. But does every designer think the same? Is it something that was universal? We decided we needed more data and surveyed some 120 designers. We asked what were the top five workplace factors that contributed to their happiness. The numbers were very telling and validate a lot of what we've long believed. We found they valued their culture, their co-workers and the projects they work on. Let's take a look at the top five:

1. Passionate co-workers: 46.7% of those surveyed wanted their cohorts to have passion in what they do.
2. Projects: 42.7% said the types of projects they work on contribues to their happiness.
3. Company culture : 39.2% felt a strong company culture made all the difference.
4. Flexible working schedule: 32.5% said being able to take time off when needed was important.
5. Company vision and goals: 28.3% valued a company's vision and goals.

Knowing what designers want, what is important to them is crucial no matter the size of the company or what industry you work in. These are the things we take into consideration when looking for candidates and something that has driven our approach on our Job Board.

2. Designers Want to Avoid Companies With Dispassionate Co-Workers

We recently looked into what designers weren't looking for in a job. Although our data is still preliminary, here's what we've found so far. And some of the results were very much the anti-matter version of the top five factors that made work enjoyable. Let's take a look at the top three so far:

1. Co-workers without passion: 42.4% said they didn't like it when their co-workers were apathetic.
2. Office politics: 40.7% didn't like when politicking goes on.
3. Micromanaging: 39% dislike being micormanaged.

We're still in the throes of conducting the survey and we'll follow up with the final results soon.

3. Videos Help Increase Engagement

Our friends from Inflection participated in our private release, posting a job and while it did fairly well they decided to repost it. This time they made one change — they added a video about their culture. Less than week later, something amazing happened, something that made us go, "whoa!"

The time potential candidates spent reading the listing skyrocketed. They spent 3:04 minutes reading the listing, 53 seconds more than before. Not only that, but the bounce rate dropped, from 83% to 74%. But it wasn't just that they slapped a video up and called it a day. Inflection spent the time giving folks something of value, a video that really highlighted their company culture and outlining exactly what the company's vision is. It was the perfect compliment to the listing, giving potential candidates a real sense of where they'll be working and who they'll be working with.

4. No, Really ... Well-Written Posts Entice Potential Candidates

We've seen a lot of job postings elsewhere that lacked any spark and didn't seem to be interested in connecting with potential candidates. We found them a bit lackluster. Which is why we worked to tailor all job posts to fit our audience and the Design community. Here's what we learned from the editorial process:

• Don't start off with the job right out of the gate. You've got to start off with an introduction. Tell potential candidates a bit about who you are, what your mission and vision is. Most of all, highlight how you're going to work together.
• Don't be photo shy. Photos are a great way to illustrate your work environment and culture.
• What do you bring to the table.Just as important as the job requirements is telling a future employee how they'll be rewarded for their hard work.

We even put together a Notable post to help show companies what goes into making a great listing. A well-written post can make all the difference in the world. If a potential candidate isn't snagged in the first few lines, they may never apply. We even took our own medicine and rewrite our own job listing for a Designer.

Final Thought

It's tough to find great talent. But keeping in mind who your potential candidates are and crafting job listings that appeal to them will go a long way in bridging the gulf between companies and hiring great talent. Which is why we've launched our Job Board. We're in a unique position to bring companies closer to our audience of passionate designers and engineers.

Check Out Our Job Board »