As a brand and visual marketing guy, I often need to become a chameleon and slip into the clothes of another brand, make some nice images or ideate on some icons.
In that vein, here are five tools that I use on a weekly basis to maintain my skills as a masterful professional ;)
If you think others can enjoy the fruits of these tools, please tweet this post or share to Linken 💪
1. ColorPick Eyedropper
Available here in the Chrome store. This tool is great for finding colours so that you can create presentations or landing pages even if you don’t have a set of brand guidelines to hand.
For example, I was creating a survey the other day and wanted the button colours to match those used on the client’s site.
I boldly fired up ColorPick Eyedropper, clicked on the colour, got my HEX code and laughed in the face of colour-based setbacks.
2. What Font
Available here in the Chrome store. You can think of this like the font version of the ColorPick Eyedropper tool above.
Activate the tool, set the crosshairs on the unknown font, and bam! The font is known.
3. The Noun Project
The Noun Project is a website dedicated to icons! As you work on a brand or in a marketing team, you’ll likely need a new icon from time to time. The Noun Project means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—you can steal and adapt with pride.
Say you need to work out what a COVID-19 icon should look like… Whack in the search and see what pops up:
It’s amazing how many of these look like planets!
4. Screenshot Master: Full Page Capture
Screenshot Master: Full Page Capture is available here in the Chrome store. If you saw my blog on fighting COVID, you’d have seen some very long screen grabs of a website. Did I spend hours stitching them together on photoshop? Nope! I took a full page screen capture!
This tool lets you download them as JPEGs and PNGs… Now speaking of PNGs… Read on!
5. Tiny PNG
Tiny PNG is a website. If you're interested in optimising images for websites or blogs, this is a handy tool. When you upload a large file, a helpful panda processes and chews out a smaller file. It works with both JPEGs and PNGs.
As an FYI, if you can get your images for blogs and web pages under 300KB, the internet will reward you with a better SEO ranking, as a function of reduced page load speed.
Further reading
Simon Dean is a brand consultant and storytelling expert. This is part one of a two blog series. You can find part 2—5 More Handy Tools for Bloggers and Digital Marketers—over at the Growth Velocity Marketing Academy.
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