If you’ve been following our articles for years, it’d be hard to not have heard of ZURB, the team behind a number of awesome yet simple web apps. There’s Reel for simple presentations, Axe for critiquing designs from your iPad, Chop for getting feedback on your code snippets, Strike for simple online todo lists, and more in their lineup of free web apps. Then, there’s their pro suite of Influence, Verify, Solidify, and Notable to help you present, get feedback on, and test your designs and mockups. ZURB also is the team behind Foundation, the responsive front-end framework that makes building modern sites much simpler.
With all those apps and tools already under their belt, the ZURB team decided to extend their reach a bit earlier this year when they bought out the design community Forrst. They’ve just released a private version of their fully redesigned Forrst, and it’s finally apparent how it fits into their vision.
Helping You Perfect Your Designs
ZURB is all about helping you perfect your designs and translate them into great products. You only have to look at the tools they’ve made, most of which center around testing and getting feedback on your designs, to see that. They’re also focused on promoting the best web coding practices and helping developers make responsive sites both through their blog and events, and with their Foundation framework.
Forrst is the network to join for design feedback
Forrst has part of the show-and-tell aspects of Dribbble, combined with the conversations you’d associate with sites like Hacker News, all focused on design. It’s been an interesting network for a long time, but not one that’s ended up as popular as Dribbble. And with Adobe buying out Behance and incorporating it into Creative Cloud, it’d almost seem that alternates have little place left in the market. But the relaunch Forrst proved the perfect way to both let ZURB “eat their own dogfood” and make the network the best place to get design feedback — one that can easily stand on its own against the other design networks.
First off, it’s got a beautifully responsive design that’s built from ZURB’s own Foundation framework. In fact, it was designed with mobile-first in mind, and brings a card-style interface to the design samples and discussions similar to what’s taken over so many other web interfaces. But here, it works very nice, letting you see more of the design samples at once on a desktop and still get the same great experience on mobile.
Give direct feedback on images
A nice site isn’t enough, though, to make Forrst stand out in the market, when everyone’s already talking on social networks all day, so ZURB built their own feedback tools from Notable into the new Forrst. Now, when you share an image on Forrst, viewers can select any portion of the image and leave a comment there for you. It’s a simple way to extend Forrst, and combined with its existing discussions and community features, it makes it the most obvious place to go when you want feedback on your designs.
The redesign is filled with beautiful touches
Forrst is still an invite-only network, much like Dribbble, but if you’re often looking for feedback on your design work, it’s the network you’ll want to try to get into. With the new redesign, ZURB’s Forrst purchase makes a ton of sense for a company that already makes a ton of apps to help people improve and get feedback on their designs. It’ll be interesting to see how they continue to improve the network going forward!
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