Peek Behind Great Colors For Your Blog Design

by SBA · 3 comments

in Design, Resources

When you paint or decorate a room I’m sure you use a pantone guide to find a perfect color. Give the number to the sales person and you’re half way there. If only it was that easy with blog colors. Well, the handy browser add-on called ‘Colorzilla’ comes to the rescue. With Colorzilla you can peek behind any color on your screen to reveal the codes.


Why you need to know the color code

Many templates or editing programs give you some basic color selections, but you want to match that great shade you saw on a web page. Unfortunately, the program does not understand ‘I want that purple gray with a hint of rose.” If the program allows you to input a color code then you can use your dream color.

So how does it work
The add-on uses a small eye-dropper icon in the bottom left corner of your FireFox browser. Click the eye-dropper to activate a hash cursor. Point to the color you want and click. If you wanted this lovely shade of green, then two codes would be displayed next to the eye-dropper.

The first code is called RGB (red, green and blue) and the second is Html. So if your template editor or Blogger fonts & color setting let you key in Html, you would use “#7F8A6A” and off you go. Other programs require RGB, so give them “127,138,106″ and they’re happy.

Use for your blog design

Want to match a color already in your template? Suppose you’re designing a header and need to match the template background where the image will go. You could look in the template code — not my first choice — or just click the colorzilla icon and move your cursor to the color you want. So for this blog’s menu bar , colorzilla shows me these codes for the different shades of gray (no, they are not both black!). The RGB for the top is “50,46,4″ while the bottom shade is “58,58,58″.Or maybe you want your font accent color or post background to match a picture in your header or in a photograph on Flickr. Just call up the webpage, pick that shade with the eye-dropper and note the two color codes. Nice! Your reader will notice the difference.

Summary

Colorzilla is a beautifully simple yet utterly indispensable little plugin.”

There are a couple of other surprises with this add-on. After installing, right click on the eye-dropper and see for yourself! It only works with Firefox and Mozilla Suites. [one more reason to leave Internet Explorer!]. So what are you waiting for? Put your colorzilla decoder to use and spruce up your blog!

Photo by jepoirrier
SBA
SBA is a web designer and co-founder of BloggingWithSuccess.net. She publishes BPWebNews a place for Blogspot tips and tricks. You can also find her on Twitter. Read SBA's other posts. She's also published a couple of guest posts.

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How to use drop-cap styling
October 2, 2009 at 4:02 PM

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Fransiska Ike November 14, 2008 at 1:30 AM

Yeah, pretty neat since it’s able to display colors in both RGB and HTML syntax. This is useful for blog/website designers. :)

But one thing, if your Firefox’s footer is crowded already (like mine) with another addons’ display, this colorzilla won’t be displayed properly since its result would be truncated. :\ Guess I have to reduce the clutter on my Firefox’s footer, eh?

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SBA November 14, 2008 at 11:02 PM

Yep! But the eye dropper is in the corner. Even if the text is truncated just let your mouse hover and the codes will be displayed!!!

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