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.
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 will remain at Colorlouvers and won’t join ZURB. He will, however, likely remain an active participant and continue to contribute to the Forrst community.
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 ZURB, 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.
