Google Chrome’s new tab page can be customized with extensions, and it’s often one of the best ways to get the most out of your browser.
While a lot of these extensions target productivity, there are some specific add-ons for certain types of people.
If you’re a designer, artist, writer, or generally a creative mind, these will inspire and help you on your journey.
Some extensions provide inspiration for new tab colors and fonts, paintings to admire, and quotes from great minds. Others provide useful tools like Blackboard for you to sketch on or a universal search for stock photos, audios and videos.
1. Paletab (Chrome, Firefox): Discover new fonts and colors in every new tab
Finding a unique combination of a color palette and a font set that complements it can be really frustrating because it looks like the best ones are already taken. Developer Tim Holman and designer Claudio Guglieri provide inspiration every time you open a new tab with Palettab.
The extension uses free and open-source Google Fonts with some of the best color schemes from Color Lovers, a community of color enthusiasts who share gorgeous combinations for anyone to use. You’ll see five colors chosen by the palette creator and five fonts to go with each.
Each font is credited with the name of the creator, and the color scheme is given due credit as well. You can hover over a color to see its hex code and click the font to be taken to the Google Fonts page to download it. And if you don’t like the existing combination, just hit the refresh button as many times as you want to get new combos.
2. Mujli (Chrome, Safari): Inspiration and essential links for designers in a 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 created by the folks behind the online whiteboard tool InVision, which has fast become one of the go-to apps for design collaboration.
The team pulls links from across the web to create a constantly updated set of links for you to be inspired by. The featured marquee shows the five best items to check out, and you can scroll down for a beautiful, curated grid of design inspiration. 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 the Muzeli Color Palette Generator for quickly trying out different combinations. And you can visit Mujli Collection for design related collection of resources like UI Kits, Product Page Templates, Logos & Icons etc.
3. The Blackboard (Chrome): Free Blackboard or Whiteboard Drawing Tool in New Tab
While there are many great free online whiteboard tools, there are surprisingly few new tab whiteboard extensions for Chrome. We just wanted a fast and lightweight add-on that starts when you open a new tab, and lets you grab your ideas fast. So glad to see the newly launched The Blackboard – and yes, it has a black background, not white. You have to be with her.
Of course, this is a very basic drawing canvas. The current design tools only let you choose the brush size and brush color (red, yellow, green, white, blue, and orange). You can quickly undo your previous 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 over with a blank canvas.
Blackboard has a button to save your creations, but it’s not clear where they’re stored or how to reopen them, so don’t bother with it. A screenshot would work better. But yeah, the whole extension runs offline, so all your data is private, and it’s insanely fast.
If you can’t stand the completely black background and want a whiteboard, check out Whiteboard New Tab for Chrome. It also includes a search box.
4. Stock House (Chrome): Universal stock image, audio, video search in new tab
If you’re a designer, blogger, podcaster, video producer, or any other kind of online creative, it’s almost guaranteed that you regularly visit the best free stock photography sites to find images, audio clips, or video footage. will be required. Stocks House is a great little extension that lets you search multiple sites at once.
You can select or deselect any of these sites before running your universal search. Tapping Enter will open a new window with tabs for all the selected websites to search for the keywords you input.