15 Essential Chrome Extensions for Designers and Developers

Not so long ago we published a post about the iPhone apps any designer should know. A similar post about Android apps will soon follow but for now let’s move on to Chrome’s awesome design and developers applications. Why Chrome? Well, apart from being my personal favorite, I believe chrome is the most hassle free web browser in comparison to its competitors, and of course it’s also the most used browser these days.

With the right extensions, Chrome, can really ease the work for designers and developers. We did our best to feature just new and fresh extensions in order actually help the savvy designers that probably know and use some design related extensions. These apps are mostly used to accelerate the workflow by making things easy and it will definitely improve your productivity if you take a little time to get to know them.

1. Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Anno This is one of the best chrome extensions for capturing screenshots. You either take a snapshot of an entire page or a specific portion. Also, you can mark your screenshot with circles, arrows and a lot more. This is indeed a great way to capture your screen.

2. Window Resizer With this extension, you can easily resize the window of your browser. This will help you in the QA process of different screen resolutions, hence, making things a lot easier.

3. CSS Grady Thanks to CSS Grady, generating CSS Gradients just got way too easier. You can also generate multibrowser CSS3 code automatically and that too in a snap. This cannot get any better, can it?

4. Color Picker This is basically a color picker for web developers. It helps you in picking up any color from the web page you are viewing. In addition to this, you can also transform colors of elements within DOM.

5. Pixlr express We all know that photo editing is the new craze so Pixlr express is considered to be a user friendly and contemporary picture editor. It has everything to offer to you starting from interesting effects, various overlays, colorful borders and what not. With all this, you will also get an option to adjust pictures, add stickers and obviously add tools.

6. Pixlr Editor This editor is awesome and I use it all the time. The best thing about it is that it is absolutely free. It is rich in features and you do not have to download anything as it is located right on your browser.

7. CSS Shack Just like Photoshop, or other photo editing softwares, CSS-Shack will let you create different styles of layers and allows you to export them either into an individual CSS file or you can also copy them onto the clipboard.

8. Balsamiq Mockups I personally love this one as it allows me to build and make changes to different sketch-quality wireframes. It also allows me to share these wireframes and that too within Drive.

9. ShiftEdit This is an online ODE that allows developers and designers to develop PHP, CSS, HTML, RUBY with the usage of SFTP or Google Drive or Dropbox.

10. Moqups As the name suggests, this app is perfect for creating unique mockups, interactive prototypes and of course wireframes. So far, this is considered to be the best HTML5 app for doing the stuff mentioned above.

11. Palette for Chrome Creating a color palette cannot get any easier. All you need to do is right click on the image and look for ‘Palette for Chrome’ option. Once you select it, it will instantly create a color palette for you from that image.

12. Web Developer This is specifically for web developers as this extension will add a toolbar button on your Chrome and it will consist of various web developer tools. I am sure it gets a lot easier to have all the necessary tools placed at one place.

13. BuiltWith Technology Profiler This is a perfect tool if you are looking to identify what a website is built with. Very intuitive and easy to use. Just press the ‘built with’ button.

14. Sight I am sure reading a code can be really difficult with all the mess going on around. Well, you don’t have to worry anymore as Sight a Syntax Highlighter Chrome extension will help you in reading the code. The best part is that things get more interesting when it offers to select theme, font and a lot more.

15. Stylebot   With the combination of custom CSS and stylebot you can actually manipulate any website’s layout.

There are a lot more Chrome extensions that you can find in order to make things easy for you. If we have missed on any great design extension that you think might be useful for others, do share it with us.