Chrome Extensions for Designers
Fast, clean and easy to customise; Google Chrome is my go-to browser. This is not least thanks to the huge range of great plugins available for it. Here are some of the extensions that I find most useful for web design.
Fontface Ninja
The ultimate typography lover’s plugin. With the extension active, hover over any website text to reveal it’s font type, line spacing, paragraph spacing and character spacing. This is great for finding inspiration and incredibly useful when taking on a new project for an existing website that you don’t have the source files for.
PerfectPixel by WellDoneCode
Produced to help develop “websites with per pixel accuracy”, this nifty quality control tool allows you to superimpose an image on to a live webpage. An opacity slider, coupled with the ability to reposition the image on the fly, makes PerfectPixel great for comparing websites to the design, and a must have for designers and developers alike.
http://www.welldonecode.com/perfectpixel/
ColorZilla
An in browser colour picker, ColorZilla comes with a few extra features. My favourites are the picked colour history, that keeps a record of your picked colours, and the webpage colour analyser that gives you the entire page’s colour palette.
Panda 5
Check the latest awwwards, dribbbles, behances and more all from your new tab page. With a highly customizable and incredibly clean interface, Panda is a wellspring of inspiration that I probably wouldn’t be able to live (design) without.
An obvious one, but nevertheless worth a mention, the Pinterest extension for chrome makes pinning easier than ever before. Hover over most images for the option of pinning them, or kick it old-school and pin images from a list via the toolbar button. Pinterest itself, if you’re not already using it, is a great way to gather inspiration and share with friends and fellow designers.