A hack for non-designers who want to design

As seen in 3 ideas for a Sunday

As written for 3 Ideas on Sunday by Nic Conley.

You’ve got to love platforms like Canva. It gives people who want to design their own graphics an alternative to hiring a professional for what would amount to about 10 minutes work for the designer. For designers and non-designers alike, there’s a great tool to use with Canva and other template driven sites and it’s called Eye Dropper.

I first heard of Eye Dropper when designing an eBook using Designrr. I had selected a template but wanted the color scheme to match that of my website. The Eye Dropper Chrome extension enables you to cursor over any color on your website, select it, and then get the palette number. With this info, you can input the number into whatever software you’re using and apply that color.

Check out the video below where I use it with Canva.

Eye Dropper can be used with most programs that let you select a color for background or text. Even in something like Microsoft Word. The images below will demonstrate how.

Just click on the arrow next to the text color button. If you want a specific to color for your text, select “More Colors.”

From the next screen choose Custom.

Follow that up by inputting the palette number using the method in the video above.

Boom! You have the color you want for your text, border, background or whatever you want colored.

This may not seem like a huge thing. When you’re a non-designer trying to design something without  annoying your designer friends by asking for help, it does come in very handy.

As always, thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet!