6 Best Chrome New Tab Extensions for Designers and Creative Minds
Reading Time: 5 minutesIf you’re a designer, artist, writer, or just generally a creative mind, these Chrome New Tab extensions will inspire and help you in your journey.
Google Chrome’s New Tab page can be customized with extensions, and it’s often one of the best ways to get more out of your browser. While a lot of these extensions target productivity, there are quite a few specific add-ons for certain types of people. If you’re a designer, artist, writer, or just generally a creative mind, these will inspire and help you in your journey.
Some extensions offer inspiration in the new tab for colors and fonts, paintings to admire, and quotes from great minds. Others give you handy tools like a blackboard to sketch in or a universal search for stock photos, audio, and video.
1. Palettab (Chrome, Firefox): Discover New Fonts and Colors in Each New Tab
It can be really frustrating to find a unique combination of a color palette and a font set that complements it because it always seems like the best ones are already taken. Developer Tim Holman and designer Claudio Guglieri offer inspiration whenever you open a new tab with Palettab.
The extension uses free, and open-source Google Fonts paired with some of the best color schemes from Colour Lovers, a community of color enthusiasts who share gorgeous combinations for anyone to use. You’ll see five colors as picked by the palette maker, and five fonts to go with each.
Each font is credited with the creator’s name, and the color scheme also is given due credit. You can hover over a color to see its hex code and click the font to be taken to the Google Font page to download it. And if you don’t like the current combination, hit the refresh button as often as you want to get new combos.
Download: Palettab for Chrome | Firefox (Free)
2. Muzli (Chrome, Safari): Inspiration and Essential Links for Designers in New Tab
Muzli is a design-oriented magazine for your New Tab page that finds the most inspiring and engaging content for creative minds. It’s made by the folks behind the online whiteboard tool InVision, which has fast become one of the go-to apps for design collaboration.
The team draws links from all around the web to create a continuously updated set of links for you to seek inspiration from. The featured marquee showcases five of the best items to check, and you can scroll down for a beautiful, curated grid of design inspiration. The links can be filtered by highlights, trending, design, tech, culture, and news.
The Muzli extension lets you search Muzli for tools, guides, or other information. It also includes shortcuts to a Muzli color palette generator to quickly try out different combinations. And you can visit Muzli Collections for design-related collections of resources, like UI kits, product page templates, logos, and icons, etc.
Download: Muzli for Chrome | Safari (Free)
3. The Blackboard (Chrome): Free Blackboard or Whiteboard Drawing Tool in New Tab
While there are several fantastic free online whiteboard tools, there are surprisingly few New Tab whiteboard extensions for Chrome. All we wanted was a fast and light add-on that would fire up when you open a new tab, and you can draw your thoughts quickly. So it was a delight to see the newly launched The Blackboard — and yes, it has a black background, not white. You’ll have to live with that.
Admittedly, it’s a very basic drawing canvas. The current design tools let you only choose a brush size and brush color (red, yellow, green, white, blue, and orange). You can quickly undo your last changes on the board and use the eraser to remove any unwanted elements. And if you don’t want any of it, hit Reset to start with a blank canvas.
The Blackboard has a button to save your creations, but it’s unclear where they are stored or how to open them again, so don’t bother with this. A screenshot will do a better job. But yes, the entire extension runs offline, so all your data is private, and it’s blazing fast.
If you absolutely can’t stand the black background and want a whiteboard, then check out Whiteboard New Tab for Chrome. It also includes a search box.
Download: The Blackboard for Chrome (Free)
Download: Whiteboard New Tab for Chrome (Free)
4. Stocks House (Chrome): Universal Stock Image, Audio, Video Search in New Tab
If you’re a designer, blogger, podcaster, video creator, or any other type of online creative, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll need to regularly visit the best free stock photography sites to find images, audio clips, or video footage. Stocks House is a nifty little extension that lets you search multiple sites simultaneously.
Currently, Stocks House supports the following sites for a universal stock image, audio, or video search:
Photo: Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, iStock, Visual Hunt, Stock Snap, Shutterstock, Free Range, Shopify Burst
Audio: NoCRSounds, Videvo, Clip Canvas, SoundEffects+, Pond5, Sound Bible, Pexels
Video: Pixabay, Videezy, Pond5, iStock, Vimeo Free, Pexels, Shutterstock, Videyo, Clip Canvas
You can select or unselect any of these sites before you run your universal search. Tapping Enter will open a new window with tabs for all the chosen websites, searching for the keywords you input.
Download: Stocks House for Chrome (Free)
5. The Creative Independent (Chrome): Inspirational Quotes from Creative Geniuses
The Creative Independent is a website that curates essays, articles, interviews, and other sources of thoughts expressed by some of the world’s leading authors, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other creative professionals. Every day, they publish something new to serve as a spark, inspiration, or guidance for other creative minds.
Their New Tab extension is a lovely way to get a dose of inspiration and insight into the creative process every time you press Ctrl + T. You’ll see a poignant quote by a famous artist, along with their name and what context they were talking about it. Clicking the link will take you to the full article on The Creative Independent. But more often than not, just that little snippet will be the push you need to get those creative juices flowing.
Download: The Creative Independent for Chrome (Free)
6. Google Arts & Culture (Chrome): View and Understand Classic Paintings in New Tab
What could be a better source of creative inspiration than looking at a classic painting? The Google Arts & Culture extension shows you a masterpiece from their vaults whenever you open a new tab. It includes the artist’s name and the painting’s current location, as well as a link to read more about it on the Google Arts and Culture website.
You can customize the extension to be only a full-screen painting for maximum inspiration or display productivity elements of the New Tab page. Go into the ‘Manage Extension’ options to choose to change the artwork daily or in every new tab and to show or hide Chrome Apps buttons, Top Sites buttons, and the New Tab button.
Download: Google Arts and Culture for Chrome (Free)
How to Pick the Best New Tab Extension for You
While all these extensions are great in their own way, you can obviously only use one of them as your New Tab. If you’re struggling with these choices, ask yourself which of these you are most likely to need multiple times in a workday. After all, you’ll be seeing this extension quite often, so it should be worth your while.