No matter what kind of designer you are, you will surely like to have extra handy tools to manage your workflow.
As a designer, what’s the software you absolutely need on your computer? The chances are it is Photoshop and Illustrator. While those are the essentials of your design workflow, there are some fantastic browser extensions you probably don’t know you need.
These extensions are useful to solve problems with design and make you do amazing things — everything that you need to supercharge your design skills.
Best Browser Extensions for Designers
Whether you are a graphic designer or web designer, you’ll surely find some value with these fantastic extensions—so have fun testing them out and happy downloading.
1.WhatFont– Tool to identify fonts on web pages
Just imagine you have landed on a beautiful website and notice the font used in the headline is magnificent. You can’t wait to use it for your website and other designing purposes. Identifying fonts was a tedious task previously, often requiring you to contact the website owner to know what font did he or she use.
But guess what? You don’t have to do that anymore! You can identify the fonts on webpages. There is a tool to help you out in your font hunting- and the name of the tool is Whatfont. As the name suggests, WhatFont inspects fonts on webpages by just hovering on them.
WhatFont is incredibly useful for designers. It uses deep learning to search for font styles so that you can find the best matching fonts for your website. Upload a clear image of the text containing the font you need to identify and make sure the text is horizontal. The extension uses advanced AI (artificial intelligence) to find the font in 90% of the cases. It is that simple and elegant.
WhatFont will show over 60 fonts very similar to the one used in the image you have uploaded and with links to pages, providing you with an idea from where you can download or purchase them. And, use the font according to the license agreement.
2.Muzli – Tool to find design inspiration
Designers are scared of imitation, and they have reason to be cautious. Take, for instance, the story of Japanese designer Kenjiro Sano, who designed the first logo for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. But, designing Japan’s Olympics logo didn’t go as smoothly as planned when he was accused of ripping a Belgian theatre with a nearly identical emblem. As a result of this accusation, the Tokyo Olympic Committee scrapped his design entirely, and his reputation was ruined.
There are endless ways to find design inspiration out there, but how about letting it all come to you every time you open a new tab? Muzli does exactly that. It is a great Chrome extension that instantly delivers cutting-edge design projects and news each time a new tab is open in your browser.
Nice, simple and easy to use- Muzli bring you the latest design and all-new shots from the web, so you can get a dose of creativity. You can discover the best web design inspiration, web trends, best websites, best logos, best mobiles sites and applications, innovative illustrations, design features, photography projects, and visual art, as well as opinions and articles from design experts across the web.
Muzli is a much-loved tool in the design community, used by more than 200,000 designers
3. Sizzy– Tool for responsive design
If you are designing a website, make it responsive. Make your design look great and work well on a desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile phone.
Gone are the days when you are forced to go through the tedious process of testing out your web designs for every screen. The Sizzy Chrome extension allows you to preview a website on multiple devices at once. All you have to do is insert the website URL and filter what devices you would like to preview the design on.
Sizzy helps you develop a responsive design which adjusts as per the size of the user’s screen and improves the user’s browsing experience.
4. Corporate Ipsum– Tool for generating text
Are you someone who gets bored seeing the same first paragraph of Lorem Ipsum text on design drafts? Spice it up with Corporate Ipsum that generates text for you in the blink of an eye making your work simple and easy.
Corporate Ipsum is a Chrome extension which is handy and very entertaining to use. Corporate Ipsum uses real English words and sometimes the text as a whole doesn’t make sense, but that adds to the fun!
It provides a paragraph of text that will look much more natural than your standard Lorem Ipsum. This is extremely useful for text-heavy designs.
Corporate Ipsum is a top-notch dummy text generator that’s designed to meet the requirements of corporate paper-pushers all across the globe.
5. Speed Tracer – Tool to identify performance issues in web applications
Are you a web developer obsessed with performance? If so, you would love Speed Tracer.
Speed Tracer is an extension that enables you to identify any performance issue in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low-level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs.
Speed Tracer looks into the performance of web applications like never before. It looks at the various parts of the website that are loading and running in the background, while the entire site is being rendered. Using Speed Tracer, you can get a better picture of where time is getting wasted in your application. You can quickly identify sluggish parts in your web applications.
Wrap Up
With these time-saving extensions, tasks that are normally tedious can be done with a few clicks, and the good thing is that you don’t even have to leave the web browser to do amazing things. Designers and developers alike will find these extensions super-useful.
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