ZURB has been in the news a lot recently. It acquired Patterntap, and has been fully active in the ‘playground,’ its well-known spot to share creative design tools and experiments from its design and engineering teams. Recently, it started playing with off-canvas layouts (think Facebook, Sparrow, and Path iOS apps). But in the midst of all that activity, the ZURB team were culminating months of work. ZURB Foundation, probably the world’s most favorited and advanced responsive front-end framework, has just reached 3.0.

Often compared to Twitter’s Bootstrap, Foundation gives web designers and developers a minimally designed set of tools to build prototypes and clean website apps across all screen sizes. Also, with heavy emphasis on mobile and responsiveness, Foundation provides you with a flexible 12-column grid that can be used for simple or complicated layouts.

With Foundation 3, the framework is written in Sass, and almost all the CSS has been rewritten, making things easier to customize and restyle. It also has a semantic grid, the typography is now based on a modular scale, and more elements have been added.

Bryan Zmijewski, ZURB’s Chief Instigator (or founder), told Industry the following:

“Foundation has a far-reaching impact for people who do front-end code. It’s ZURB’s most significant release to date and we’re so excited to be able to open source our creation. The ZURB team has done a fantastic job putting together the most advanced front-end framework ever — I’m so proud. Foundation helps people think through design challenges and reduces their implementation headaches.  They are working off something that has been thoroughly tested across devices. It’s a great starting point that encourages ideas, but it’s also an implementation tool that get things done for multiple devices. It’s user-friendly and keeps the overhead at a minimum. Designers will love that it’s highly customizable and allows their creativity to shine. Marketers and Engineers will love that it streamlines development and opens up huge audiences for their products and services. We have a highly committed group of people at ZURB focused on creating something awesome. That’s often hard to get as part of an open-source project and we’re committed to supporting the community through growing Foundation.  It’s incredibly inspiring.”

With Foundation 3, ZURB’s initiatives to make a lasting impact in the framework and prototyping space have just gone from playground fun to serious playground fun. It definitely has a lot to offer, so go check it out now!