Forrst: Web Designers Coding and Web Developers Designing

Writing code and mixing it with a bit of creativity in design usually comes a long way in the development of cool websites. In fact the trend in web design and development has changed so much that web designers get involved in coding and web developers get creative themselves in order to produce efficient web sites in code and maintain the aesthecity to make the web site attractive.

Delving to why a web designer should also have coding skills and vice versa is a whole other article in itself. A few weeks ago Carsonified’s Mike Kus gave five good great reasons why designers should know how to code.This generated quite a discussion and now we have Forrst.

What is Forrst?

Forrst is a new platform for short-form sharing between designers and developers.

The Founder

It is  no big surprise to learn that Forrst is a creation of Brooklyn-based developer/designer,  Kyle Bragger. Kyle has been a developer for Huffington Post (back in the early days), more recently he’s CTO of Gary Vaynerchuk’s Cork’d.

The benefits of becoming a Forrster?

Like I have mentioned Forrst is new in implementation and therefore if you are a designer or developer you should get your invite now by sending an e-mail to kyle@forrst.com with the subject Id love an invite. The following are just a few of the benefits you will gain from joining Forrst and as the number of designers and developers increases the benefits will increase proportionally.

• Mike Evans (@magic6435), designer/developer shared a REST interface for mongodb
• Thaibut Ninove (@thaibutninove) posted; applescript, allows users to tweet itunes tracks
• Kushal Pisavadia (@kushalp) a London-based standards-lover shared javascript to enable faux html 5 support in IE
• Posted! Relative time stamps in PHP anyone? shared by Billy Fowks, co-founder of rososo.com
• Quirky endeavors are discovered, like the one from Jonno Riekwel (Jonnotie), a designer doing a “psd a day for a year” thing & another from a user of inspiration sharing site yayeveryday!
• Pre-launch landing pages posted for new products like tapmates’ “screenport”
• A few folks share and discuss their workspace preferences
• And, finally, jQuery badassitude gets lots of love & learning

How Forrst Works

• As at now, Forrst is still in beta and  is currently invite-only. If you weren’t lucky enough to claim one of the 250 invites for Think Vitamin readers Kyle lifts the invite code requirement for 15 minutes every day, and new users can get instant access v. waiting for an invite code via email.
• Features for now include: profiles, follows, community badges and “expert mode,” email notifications, and an activity feed.
• Use the bookmarklet for easy posting as you go about your usual day online

So send Kyle an e-mail or watch out for that e-mail notification for the 15mins and join Forrst. Hope to see you there soon.