Zurb acquires Forrst

Design and development community Forrst is a great resource for designers and developers who want to share their work and get feedback from others in their field. They made news last year when they were purchased by Colourlovers, and now they’ve been purchased once more by Zurb.

Forrst was founded by Kyle Bragger, and has raised over $200,000 in its lifetime, including a seed round of investments from 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Sokoloff, Adam Schwartz, and others.

While Dribbble and Behance often get more press, Forrst generally works better if you’re looking for constructive feedback rather than just recognition. Behance, by comparison, is more tailored to building a professional identity and finding employers, while Dribble focuses more on sharing designs and concepts with other designers. Forrst’s community provides more detailed feedback.

Another area where Forrst differs from many of the other design-sharing sites is that you can also submit code for feedback.

Zurb is aiming to create a more engaged, active community at Forrst. They plan to actively participate and foster a strong community on the site, as well as streamlining the site interface to make it more user friendly (they also plan to implement a responsive design for mobile users). Forrst had a job board at one point, but Zurb is opting to remove it to keep the site’s focus more finely tuned.

The invite system is also going to be revamped, to reward users who make high-quality, consistent contributions to the site. This should help to encourage more participation from the community.

Zurb is a great new home for Forrst, considering their 15 years of product design experience. Forrst will be a nice addition to their portfolio of apps and frameworks (including the top-20 open-source framework Foundation).

Bryan Zmijewski, Zurb’s Chief Instigator, had this to say about the acquisition:

ZURB has been helping people design for people for 15 years. As a broader effort to share and learn from the design and developer community, we see this as a great fit to some of our other efforts like the Playground, Foundation and our Design Tools. Forrst is an amazing community for learning from your peers.

Forrst already has an established community of designers, developers, and engineers, and Zurb aims to make it even better. I think they’re in a good position to do just that, based on their previous efforts.

What do you think of Zurb’s newest acquisition? Have you used Forrst in the past? Let us know in the comments!

Featured image, forest image via Shutterstock.

Cameron Chapman

Cameron Chapman is a freelance writer and designer from New England. You can visit her site or follow her on Twitter.