Design Community Colourlovers Acquires Forrst

The 500 Startups-backed dev and design community Forrst has been acquired by Colourlovers, a similarly-focused creative design community. This is the second site from Forrst founder Kyle Bragger which is coming to a close – his online marketplace TinyProj previously ended operations in January. However, in the former case, the site was being shut down with users transitioned to another service, while Forrst is reportedly the subject of an acquisition.

Forrst was originally created as a side project back in 2010, but soon became popular with the web developer and design crowd. In March of last year, the company raised $205,000 in seed funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Gary & AJ Vaynerchuk, Nate Westheimer, Sahil Lavingia, Adam Schwartz, and Jim Sokoloff.

The site served as a forum where users could share designs and code, receive feedback from other developers, ask questions or post about design topics. Members also have profiles at “Forrst.me” URLs, which offer links to Forrst posts, Twitter, GitHub, and Tumblr accounts.

According to PandoDaily, which reported on news of the acquisition this morning, the combined resources of both companies will continue to serve the design community, while also functioning as a revenue-generating business. For what it’s worth, Forrst was on its way to doing that as well – at the time of its seed funding, 10% of its accounts were “premium” accounts charging $9/month. However, Colourlovers has been around for longer – 7 years, in fact – giving it a head start in the space. The site now has nearly 1.5 million users who have shared over 5 million colors, 2 million palettes, 2 million patterns, and nearly 160,000 templates.

The company is also further ahead in terms of funding – it raised $1 million in May 2011 from investors including Atlas Venture, Morado Ventures, Founder Collective, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Seraph Group & Zelkova Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Don Hutchison, Dharmesh Shah, Jared Friedman, and Shawn Bercuson.

Colourlovers’ founders are now also working on something called “Creative Market,” which will serve as an online marketplace for digital goods, including fonts, icons, templates, and more.

The company describes the market like so:

Creative Market is the next piece of our mission that will help creatives easily access a wealth of beautiful design content for their projects. Whether it’s finding a unique vector pattern for a textile, the perfect font with personality for a new logo, or any other kind of digital creative content that helps you produce something amazing.

Our friends at Etsy.com empowered the handmade goods revolution. We believe we can do the same for mousemade goods.

No word yet on the acquisition terms or how the two sites will combine their resources going forward.