Chrome extensions are convenient software tools that let you personalize your browsing experience. These tools can enhance your browser’s functionalities to make it more useful. Once you know these, you’ll realize what you’ve missed all this time.
The Chrome Web Store has something for just about everyone. Whether you’re a graphic designer or not, a certain set of extensions can simplify your life by just being installed.
The Need for Chrome Extensions
Having the right tools would save so much of your time and would also enhance your creativity. Let’s see what some of the reasons why every graphic designer should have these extensions are:
- Creative Thinking: These extensions can be helpful if you need additional help from the appropriate source. You can learn different things and use these to enhance your abilities and creativity.
- Time-saving: Time is more valuable than anything, and to meet deadlines, you must realize that you need all the help you can get. Your client wants a high-quality design as soon as possible. You can set up chrome extensions that enable you to automate your tasks, enhance capabilities, and simplify your workflow.
- Improved Deliverability: By working more quickly and efficiently, you can easily increase your deliverables while continuing to produce high-quality designs.
Must-have Google Chrome Extensions for Designers
1. Night Eye
You can use Night Eye to look after your eyes. Night Eye allows you to enable dark mode on a large number of websites by converting colors for a smooth and consistent viewing experience. Many websites come with a built-in dark mode which you can control using Night Eye to toggle easily.
For those who don’t wish to switch to dark mode but still wish to keep it easy on your eyes, Night Eye comes with a Filtered Mode which allows you to adjust brightness, contrast, warmth, and more.
2. ColorZilla
With more than 3 million users on Chrome, ColorZilla is by far the best solution for all your color-related needs. It provides an advanced color picker tool to facilitate color reading from any point in your browser. Some more significant features include a website palette detector, gradient generator, element information, and a picked-colors history.
3. WhatFont
Q: “What is the quickest way to learn what fonts were used on a website?”
A: “WhatFont!”
Once you enable this chrome extension, your cursor will display the fonts of anything it hovers over. Simply click on the text you wish to inspect, and WhatFont will expand into a small box providing a detailed analysis of the font used.
4. Muzli 2
Muzli is an all-in-one news feed that covers all the buzz and trends about designing from around the web. It covers topics like UI, UX, design trends, and much more. It becomes your browser homepage, so you don’t miss out on anything!
5. UX Check
This extension allows you to run a quick and easy heuristic evaluation of your website. Heuristic evaluation is a method to inspect website usability, which helps spot potential issues in the user interface design. It displays Nielsen’s Ten Heuristics in a side pane. It also lets you add notes and save and export them to your team.
6. GoFullPage
GoFullPage lets you capture a screenshot of your current webpage in its entirety. When you click the extension icon (or press Alt+Shift+P), the extension will begin to screenshot the entire page. You can then download the screenshot as an image or PDF or just drag it to your desktop.
The extension automatically saves your captures so you can refer to them anytime in the future, along with the webpage from which it was captured. It also comes with an in-built editor that allows you to add elements (text, shapes, emojis), crop, or blur your capture.
As you can see, the Chrome Web Store offers an impressive variety of tools for you to use. We hope you’ve found at least one or two that you’re prepared to install.
