ZURB Acquires Design Community Forrst From Colourlovers

Product design company ZURB just announced that it has acquired Forrst, the 500startups alumni Colourlovers acquired for an undisclosed amount in March 2012. Forrst aims to be a design community for “sharing work and inspiration, getting valuable and constructive feedback and ultimately getting better at your craft.” The terms of today’s acquisition were not disclosed.

This is purely an asset transaction, so none of the Forrst/Colourlovers employees involved in the project will move to ZURB. Colourlovers did not respond to our request for comments about why it decided to sell Colourlovers after its short tenure with the company.

Update: While Colourlovers didn’t answer our email, the company’s CEO and Founder Darius Monsef posted the following on HackerNews after the acquisition was announced:

We acquired Forrst because we’re community people and we saw a great opportunity to help Forrst grow as a place for creatives to get better at their craft / share information. With COLOURlovers we have a thriving community for creative inspiration and we recently launched CreativeMarket.com as a place closer to the execution side of projects. Forrst played well as an opportunity to connect with users along the spectrum. What we noticed though was that with all our attention on the successful launch of Creative Market, we weren’t finding the time to really devote to Forrst to make it great. And being respectful to quality communities, we thought the best thing to do for it would be to find a home for it that could dedicated those resources. We’ve known ZURB for several years and had partnered with them on a creative project before. We reached out, had a conversation and mutually saw a great opportunity for them to grow the Forrst community.

Forrst was founded by Kyle Bragger and raised a total of $205,000 in seed funding from investors like 500 Startups, Nate Westheimer, Adam Schwartz, Jim Sokoloff, Sahil Lavingia, Gary Vaynerchuk and AJ Vaynerchuk. Bragger left Colourlovers before the acquisition and will likely remain an active participant and continue to contribute to the Forrst community.

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Unlike similar services like Behance, which was recently acquired by Adobe, Forrst focused more on helping designers share their ideas and get detailed and constructive answers to their questions.

ZURB has long been launching its own products like Foundation or Solidify for designers on top of doing work for its clients. In addition, it also acquired the design database and community Patter Tap last June. When Colourlovers acquired Forrst, the company said that it would bundle the combined resources of the two companies and continue to serve the design community. Forrst, however, remained an independent site and continues to have an active community.

ZURB tells us that it plans to remove the job board from Forrst so that the site’s focus will be squarely on “detailed design feedback.” ZURB also says it want to use its product design experience” to lead the Forrst community forward to achieve great things,” starting with a new interface and responsive design for mobile usage.