Here at Design and Prosper we are all about making the design process easy, quick and seamless for graphic and brand designers.

Enter Google Chrome Extensions. Sorry Apple, but if you’re a graphic designer it’s time to ditch Safari because there’s too much goodness hiding in Chrome!

We discovered these hidden gems as part of our ongoing web developing practice, but quickly discovered that they were not only useful for web designers, but for graphic and brand designers too.

You might be familiar with extensions because chances are you have the Pinterest ‘Save’ button and possibly the Grammarly one too. And if you don’t have these two aforementioned extensions, add them to the list below.

Google Chrome extensions are amazing little resources which help to speed up and optimise your workflow and best of all, they are totally free, which we love.

Here’s our top 5 must-have Google Chrome extensions for graphic and brand designers

ColorZilla
This works as a colour picker for any elements you see on a website page. Simply use the eyedropper tool and sample any colour, just as you would in Illustrator or Photoshop. Et voila, you’ve copied the hex code to your computer clipboard. It also shows the RGB breakdown and will save recently picked colours into a history palette.

OneTab
Too many tabs open in your web browser is not overwhelming for you headspace, it slows down the processing power of your computer.

OneTab fixes all of that with a click. It will summarise all your open tabs into one neat and tidy, easily accessible page. Ahhh. Breathe easy. If you’re the type of person who accumulates tabs daily, you can click OneTab and it will add them to the OneTab master list. 

Chrome Ipsum
Most designers will be very familiar with Latin ‘lorem ipsum’ dummy text. Most creative cloud applications allow you to easily insert dummy text from within the app itself, but this is very helpful when creating designs using online apps. The great thing about Chrome Ipsum is that you have two additional dummy copy choices—it doesn’t just offer Latin text, it offers what they call Gangsta Ipsum and Hipster Ipsum. which can add a lighthearted humour to your presentations. Also, if you are a fan of the dynamic spelling feature in InDesign and other apps, having endless paragraphs of words that the English dictionary doesn’t recognise is a bit disconcerting and visually offputting.

Easy Window Resize
This one is a must-have for anybody who has designs websites..or has a website! It will resize your screen so you can see how responsive your website is on different devices. For example, if you are working from a 15” MacBook Pro (1440 x 900) you can set your chrome display window to the size of a 21-inch Imac, (1680 x 1050), and vice versa. On smaller screens, you’ll need to scroll to the right to see all the elements and reset your screen back down again, but it’s brilliant for when you are working off-site and only have your laptop.

Fonts Ninja
We’ve saved our favourite for last. Have you ever landed on a beautiful website and wondered which fonts they are using? When you click on the Fonts Ninja extension, you’ll be able see which fonts are in use and typesetting specifications such as font size, letter spacing, font weight etc.

Fonts Ninja has been an amazing source of uncovering a stunning array of fonts, including free fonts from Google’s ever-expanding font directory. This won’t work if the typography on the site is image-based, however as a side-note—it’s not good practice to include words as images on websites.

Have fun exploring this great resource!

Much love,
Kris & Don xo