A couple of useful extensions that I found online for Downloading a remote image and setting a hex colour code in Swift

Extensions.swift

extension UIImageView {
    func downloadImageFrom(link link:String, contentMode: UIViewContentMode) {
        NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL( NSURL(string:link)!, completionHandler: {
            (data, response, error) -> Void in
            dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
                self.contentMode =  contentMode
                if let data = data { self.image = UIImage(data: data) }
            }
        }).resume()
    }
}

extension UIColor {
    convenience init(colorCode: String, alpha: Float = 1.0) {
        //Nice little ammendment from Bionik if you have a copy/paste with the #
        if colorCode.containsString("#") { colorCode.removeAtIndex(colorCode.startIndex) }
        let scanner = NSScanner(string: colorCode)
        var color: UInt32 = 0
        scanner.scanHexInt(&color)
        
        let mask = 0x000000FF
        let r = CGFloat(Float(Int(color >> 16) & mask)/255.0)
        let g = CGFloat(Float(Int(color >> 8) & mask)/255.0)
        let b = CGFloat(Float(Int(color) & mask)/255.0)

        self.init(red: r, green: g, blue: b, alpha: CGFloat(alpha))
    }
}

The UIColor extension allowing the "#" sign, resulting to this:

let yellowColor = UIColor(colorCode: "#e9b71c") 
// or this version
let yellowColor = UIColor(colorCode: "e9b71c")

extension UIColor {
  convenience init(var colorCode: String, alpha: Float = 1.0) {
    if colorCode.containsString("#") { colorCode.removeAtIndex(colorCode.startIndex) }
    let scanner = NSScanner(string: colorCode)
    var color: UInt32 = 0
    scanner.scanHexInt(&color)
    let mask = 0x000000FF
    let r = CGFloat(Float(Int(color >> 16) & mask) / 255.0)
    let g = CGFloat(Float(Int(color >> 8) & mask) / 255.0)
    let b = CGFloat(Float(Int(color) & mask) / 255.0)
    self.init(red: r, green: g, blue: b, alpha: CGFloat(alpha))
  }
}

Amended :)