Maximize design efficiency with these Raycast extensions

Raycast is a productivity command bar tool that allows you to access tons of cool features and (free) extensions to make your workflow more efficient. The best part? Almost the entire Yummygum team are avid Raycast users, making it a popular choice among both designers and developers. But what sets Raycast apart from other productivity tools out there? Well for one, it's incredibly intuitive and easy to use. With just a few keystrokes, you can access a wealth of features and extensions that will help you get your work done faster and more efficiently.

This is the second post in a two piece blog post series dedicated to Raycast and its extensions we use as professionals. Donovan shared his favorite Raycast extensions for development in his blog post earlier. Today I’ll share my favorite Raycast plugins that will help you maximize design efficiency.

Our top extensions for design

1. Figma File Search

If you design in Figma like our Visual Design team does, Figma File Search is the first extension you will want to have installed. The extension lets you search and open Figma files. On top of that it also shows your most recently opened Figma files when you select the extension in Raycast.

2. Lorem Ipsum

The name of this extension already kinda gives it away; it helps you quickly generate placeholder Lorem Ipsum copy to use *in* and outside your design tool. You can generate words, sentences and even entire paragraphs. Although we would typically advise against sharing designs with clients that contain Lorem Ipsum copy, it’s a great start in the early design stages.

3. Remove background

Although you’ll probably want to use a more robust tool like Photoshop to remove backgrounds from images, remove.bg is a great starting point for quick and dirty cutout work. The Remove Background Raycast extension makes removing backgrounds from images even faster. All you have to do is create a remove.bg account and create an API key. Just paste that into the extensions configuration in Raycast and you’re good to go.

4. Google Fonts

Little in life is better than enjoying the nuances and subtle details in typeface characters. Picking premium typefaces can help give that extra oomph to both brand identities and product design. For projects that don’t allow the luxury of using premium typefaces, there’s always Google Fonts. The eponymous extension for Raycast lets you browse through Google Fonts typefaces right in Raycast. 

5. Quicklinks

This quicklink functionality is baked into Raycast by default and can be used for all kinds of quick links to local files and folders and URLs. What makes it appealing to designers is the web search option which you can use to perform search queries on design inspiration websites. We use it to search Dribbble, Layers, Behance or Iconfinder for design inspiration.

6. HeroIcons

If you’re in need of quick (placeholder) icons, HeroIcons is an amazing resource for high quality icons from the makers of Tailwind CSS. The HeroIcons Raycast extension makes it a breeze to quickly search icons to copy their name and even SVG.

7. Cleanshot

Almost the entire Yummygum team uses Cleanshot as their favorite all-in-one screenshot, screen recording and annotation tool. The Visual Design team uses it mainly to give quick feedback, especially when working remotely. Cleanshot’s official Raycast extensions allows you to control Cleanshot using Raycast. 

8. Linear

Although Linear isn’t useful strictly for designers, it certainly is for our design team! We use Linear for design project management and this Raycast extension helps to basically do everything you can think of with issues in Linear.

9. Sip

Sip has been around as a stand alone color picking app for quite some time now. Installing the Sip Raycast extension lets you control the app and its features directly from Raycast. Alternatively you can use this Raycast Script Command to pick colors.

10. Polished

As a Visual Design chances are you’ll come across RGB color codes you’ll need a HEX version of, or the other way around. Amongst many other things, Polished helps you convert HEX color codes to RGBA and HSLA color codes and vice versa. Quite nifty!

I could go on with this list but these are definitely my favorite Raycast extensions specifically for designers. Honorable mentions that didn’t make this top ten are: Compress PDF,  Slack and of course Raycast AI. What Raycast extension do you think all designers should be using? Let me know on Twitter!