The first open source framework to be responsive. The first to be semantic. The first to be mobile first. The first to be constructed with Sass. The first to have accessibility built in. Foundation is focused on the future, which has earned it the respect and trust of thousands of the world’s biggest companies who have chosen to build their brands on Foundation and millions of designers and developers around the world who use it daily. No other framework has done more to push the web forward, and it’s grown to be one of the most popular open source projects in history. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished over the last five years and our sights are set firmly forward, to the future, to new possibilities, and to continued firsts.

Foundation Love

Millions of people around the world use Foundation to create amazing things every day, making it one of the most active and inspiring open source projects in existence! From magazines to blogs, designers to CEOs, and all across the world, people love using Foundation.

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Doug Macklin

Golden State Warriors

"Foundation makes it easy to build our pages out; With all the available tools. It's easy to get add the CSS or Sass on your page and have it appear as you expect it should. Anytime I can buld with Foundation, I do."

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Steven Wu

Creative Bloq

“ZURB's Foundation framework is easy to use, powerful and provides the flexibility to prototype and build production-ready websites for any device.”

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Chris Moore

CEO Gaslight Creative

Foundation is under almost constant development. It’s updated frequently. That’s exciting for me. They’ve built something great and it keeps getting better with every release. There’s a large and active community participating in development as well. As of this writing, the foundation repo has 20,621 stars. That’s pretty impressive.

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Nick Pettit

Team Treehouse

“When I design new web projects, I always start by thinking about the mobile experience before I move on to larger screen sizes, and I personally feel like Foundation has a slight edge with block grids and collapsible rows.“

Adi Purdila of Envato
Doug Macklin of the Golden State Warriors
Daniel Bishop of BeachFleischman
Alex Smith of Fluid Junction

Brands Built on Foundation

Big brands are relying more and more on the world's most advanced, responsive front-end framework. Their sites are now built so that customers can connect with them on any device.

The
Foundation
Manifesto

We believe design is pushing the world forward.

Design is a process, a becoming, not a thing that stands in pristine isolation. We believe design is intimately entwined with the medium, starting from the why but reaching deeply through the how and into the what.

Foundation brings the medium to design.

And it brings design into the medium, making it responsive, giving shape, dimensionality and interactivity. Foundation is of the medium, constantly evolving, constantly changing, absorbing the best from practitioners around the globe.

Foundation takes the cutting edge and delivers it.

This makes it accessible, makes it usable, makes it complete. Foundation looks at the artificial wall between design and implementation and tears it down, reusing its components to lay the foundation for creativity.

Foundation is not just a framework.

It is a shared language between design and implementation. Foundation walks the line between opinionation and freedom, providing the structure to accelerate your development to the speed of imagination without ever taking away the freedom to be unique. On Foundation you are free to worry about the why and the how, letting Foundation handle the what.

You create you.

You create your brand, you create your visual identity, and Foundation brings it to your website, your app, your emails, everywhere you want it to be.

Foundation's Beginnings

The Style Guide is created to help us speed up our work. It’s a handy collection of HTML, CSS and Javascript that we use on every client project. The ideas of ZURB Style Guide evolve over the years and form the basis for a new framework, Foundation.

The style guide was solidified and named Foundation. It is being used internally on all client projects and ZURB sites and apps.

Foundation 2.0 is released to the public as an open source project! Foundation is the first responsive front-end framework and helps lead the charge for RWD across the web.

Foundation 3.0 is released! This version comes with Sass and is the first framework to use mixins and Sass partials.

This year saw not one, but three releases to Foundation! Version 4 went mobile first, added many new components, and came with a visual update. Our responsive image plugin called Interchange was added to Foundation to make sites built with it load even faster.

Foundation 5 is all about speed. It made learning, using and developing with the framework faster than ever! More new components like Equalizer, Off-canvas, and Icon-bar make a more complete package. Our responsive content plugin, Interchange can now swap in HTML content and images based on screen size.

Foundation for Emails (formerly Ink), our responsive email framework is launched at the end of the year and helps designers easily create beautiful, responsive emails.

We launched Foundation for Apps, the first front-end framework created for developing fully responsive web apps.

Foundation for Sites 6 is released. Faster, lighter, more versatile, more flexible and more powerful than ever before to get your projects from Prototype to Production.

Foundation for Emails 2 is launched, revolutionizing email development through a workflow that uses the latest web technologies.

The Future of Foundation

While it’s impressive to look back on everything Foundation has accomplished over the last five years, we always have our sights set firmly forward, towards the future and new possibilities.

Foundation for Sites

Front-end web development has never been a more exciting place to be. Browser technology is moving rapidly, advanced JavaScript frameworks are enabling more and more complex applications, and design has finally taken its seat as the driver of new product development. All of this creates an incredible landscape where Foundation is more important than ever. We’re cleaning up the existing framework to work better for all use cases, and planning ahead to keep Foundation on the cutting edge of the web.

In the immediate future, we’ll be releasing a patch release (6.2.4) on October 20 that fixes a large number of outstanding issues and continues to improve consistency between the flex grid and the traditional float grid. Following that, the next release targeted for December 2nd will improve usability and options of tabs and accordions, especially on mobile and keyboard devices. There will also be a new component that has been long requested - cards - and a bevy of additional features. Looking further into the future, we’re planning a bevy of improvements to keep Foundation on the forefront of web technology, making the next five years even more exciting than the last five.


Foundation for Emails

Developing HTML emails is finally catching up with modern web design. The email design community has been receiving one exciting update after another. With Gmail now supporting <style> tags and the folks at Outlook focusing on improving the HTML email experience for Outlook, things are looking up! We couldn’t be more excited for where Foundation for Emails is headed.

So what’s next for Foundation for Emails? In the short term, we’ll be rolling out a series of bug fixes to tighten up the overall framework and make the new and improved Gmail as happy as a clam. As we move into November, we’ll be eying to incorporate a tree-based parser so that those still wanting to inline can have more flexibility. We’re also pumped about including support for custom Inky tags that work with any language. It’s been an exciting few years with Foundation for Emails and we can’t wait to improve and simplify the world of HTML email development even more.

Help Build the Future

Join in the development of Foundation and have your work help millions of people around the world. From code and documentation to resources and support, the Foundation team welcomes contributions from anyone willing to put in the time and effort to help us and our community of users. Whether you're a grizzled open-source veteran or a curious newcomer, there’s plenty of ways to get involved!

A huge thank you to our Yetinauts...

Joe Workman
Joe Workman
joeworkman
Andrew Cochran
Andrew Cochran
andycochran
Jeremy Englert
Jeremy Englert
JeremyEnglert
Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall
colin-marshall
Brett Mason
Brett Mason
brettsmason
Marius Olbertz
Marius Olbertz
Owlbertz
Abdullah Salem
Abdullah Salem
abdullahsalem
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Jens Köhler
designerno1
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Brian Tan
briantan888
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Corey Snyder
coreysyms
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Nicolas Coden
ncoden
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And you…
yourgithubusername

And all of our contributors!

James Stone
jamesstoneco
Joe Workman
joeworkman
Ole Fredrik Lie
olefredrik
Corey Schaaf
coreyschaaf
Geoff Kimball
gakimball
Kristofer Krause
dragthor

It's been an amazing ride so far! Big thanks to everyone for being part of Foundation for the last 5 years. We're looking forward to having you by our side for the the next 5 years.

Help us celebrate and spread the birthday love!