The innovative, fast and hip browser, Google Chrome, offers many extensions allowing users to completely customize their browsing experience. Having this ability has come in handy for many of the designers here at Mopdog who use Chrome extensions to help in their design process

We’ve put together a list of some of our favorites:

WhatFont is one ofAlisa’s favorite extensions. Using WhatFont is an easy way to find out the fonts used on your favorite websites. Just hover over the text and voilà! You not only get the name of the font, but the font size and color as well. This extension makes it easy to figure out what that perfect font is without having to search through endless code.

Tape allows users to apply horizontal and vertical guidelines on a page to measure the distance between elements.

 

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance. YSlow also summarizes components and displays statistics about the page.

Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate is exactly what it name suggests: AWESOME! This extension allows the user to capture the entirety of a page or just a portion of it. The edit portion of this extension allows users to add rectangles, text, colors and blur out sensitive material.  Users also have the option to save local or upload their image and share it with others.

 

The Microstock Photo Power Search Tool is a great tool when you are looking for the perfect stock photo for your design. This extension makes the search process a whole lot easier by searching multiple libraries for the best stock photo.

ColorZilla is an advanced eyedropper, color picker, gradient tool and much more. ColorZilla can get a color reading from any point in your browser, match the color and then paste it into another program.

Chrome Sniffer helps web developers inspect web framework/CMS and JavaScript on a website. Adam says that this simple time saver lets him know if a website was built on a framework such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress without having to look for clues in the mark-up. This extension is also a great tool to use when you see a website and are interested in knowing the tricks behind it. Chrome Sniffer can detect more than 100 popular CMS & JavaScript libraries allowing a closer look into the designs of complicated sites.

Measurelt is a pixel ruler in your browser. Adam uses MeasureIt when he needs to measure something that he can’t find dimensions for in the element inspector.

AppJump App Launcher and Organizer  is a great way to quickly access and organize all of these wonderful design extensions on your browser. AppJump does it all through a drop-down menu on your tool bar, which you can further organize by separating extensions into different groups.