
Forrst, a developer network that came out of the 500startups accelerator, announced today that it has been acquired by ZURB, a 15-year-old community for product designers to help companies do design work. This is the second acquisition for Forrst in less than a year; back in March, it was acquired by design community Colourlovers. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.
ZURB says it wants to help nurture Forrst into an active design community that can be a place for designers to share ideas and receive feedback. According to a press release, they plan to:
-
We will actively listen, participate, and foster the site to build a strong, active Forrst community.
-
With a suite of design apps, a top-20 open-source framework (Foundation) and over 15 years of product design experience, we’re excited to lead the Forrst community forward to achieve great things. We’ll start by streamlining the site interface and implementing responsive design for the mobile web.
-
We’ll iterate upon and add new Forrst features to help designers and developers collaborate easily and effectively. The invite system will shift to reward users who make consistent, high-quality contributions to the site.
ZURB is a product design company with a three-pronged approach: services, product tools for designers and educational materials. The acquisition will be an asset-only deal, so no Forrst employees will be making the move to ZURB.
“Our purpose as a business is to help people design for people,” ZURB’s “Chief Instigator” Bryan Zmijewski told Betabeat. “Forrst is a community of designers and developers who are looking to develop their craft. We see alignment with all the other things we’ve been doing to really help people focus on sharing design feedback.”
Mr. Zmijewski assured Betabeat that the community will still be for developers as much as it is for designers. “From a design perspective, we look at it holistically and try to solve product problems and not just interface issues,” he said.
Mr. Zmijewski said that Colourlovers, which acquired Forrst back in March 2012, reached out to them to get the acquisition ball rolling. “Sometimes things aren’t great fits,” he offered.