ColorZilla 2.0 Firefox Add-On
Well I’m a designer, (duh), so I work with color every day. There are a ton of different tools to make using color easier both on and offline. I was going to make a post about the top 5 sources/ tools that I use for color palettes, picking, etc… but I’ve decided to take them one at a time.. I think they are so important that they are all worthy of separate posts. Then maybe I will create one post summarizing them all.
I’m going to start off with my favorite. This is a Firefox Add-On (mental note.. create a Firefox Add-On post), that I use almost daily. It’s called ColorZilla.
I was reading a post about something somewhere (so specific).. and somebody gave this tool a mention. I checked it out and fell in love. If you design websites.. do you do the following?>> Say there is a color on a website that you want/ need to know the name of. You may be in Photoshop and you need to know the exact color of the red in a companies logo. You go to the website, copy the picture (or make a screenshot if you can’t copy it), open it in Photoshop, use the eyedropper, and you have the color.. then simply delete the image. Not bad.. I used to do that every day. until ColorZilla that is..
ColorZilla is a tool that installs on the bottom left of your Firefox browser that simply has an eyedropper. Click on that, roll over the website, and it tells you the color you are over.. it updates as fast as you can scroll. Now that Firefox enlarges the entire webpage instead of just text when you give the old command+ (at least pretend you knew that), you can zoom right in on a tiny part of a picture to get the color you want. Click on the color, right click the eyedropper tool to get the copy option, over to Photoshop, paste in your number and you’re done!
This tool has more features than I even use, I see it shows CSS info as you roll over sections of the page, and who knows what else. I just love the time it saves showing me the colors.. no more cleaning up my desktop of all the screenshots I made just to get color info. Just one of those tools that speeds up your workflow in an area you probably never even considered slow before.
