Designing a website or website template from scratch means that you have to deal with color at some point. ColorZilla was designed to be that one simple tool that handles your color needs. Taking the form of an extension that is compatible with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers, ColorZilla is free, easy to install and always within reach as long as you have your browser window open.
Once installed, you should notice a new color dropper icon on your browser toolbar. Clicking this icon will bring up a small menu where you can decide how you want to obtain a particular color. If the color can already be found on a webpage, for instance, you can use the “Pick Color From Page” to transform your mouse cursor into a color dropper tool. Like any standard graphics program, you can capture the color by clicking on the exact spot. The hex color code is then copied to the clipboard. Capturing colors within your browser window may sound like a big limitation but don’t forget that you can open any standard image on your browser.
The “Color Picker” option is the other main component of this extension as it brings up a standard color dialog where you can pick the hue and shade via graphic or enter the hex color code, RGB or HSV values manually and then use the data in any desktop app you like. It even keeps track of the last few colors you copied which is pretty neat.
The extension has a couple of other cool features too including this one little feature that scans all the unique colors in a page which could be useful if you want to grasp the color combinations used in a particular page. A link to ColorZilla’s CSS gradient generator is provided as well. ColorZilla may be a pretty old browser add-on but it remains as one of the best small tools that should be on every designer’s Chrome or Firefox browser.