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Something a bit more fun and light this week. Placeholders. I hope you find something useful for your own projects. Let me know if there is anything you’d like to see on here in the future.
Sometimes when you are building out a UI, whether it be for a site, and application or something else entirely, there may be times when you don’t have all of the assets you need. Waiting for content is something that many developers have experienced and for designers it is even more likely that they won’t be working with the final imagery and text.
To fill that gap, we often use placeholders. The following are all resources we can use to generate or obtain placeholders. While this may not seem like the most important part of your development experience, it is nice to know they are there if you need them.
Placeholder.com
Don’t have that logo, banner, advertisement, or infographic for your site yet? You can insert dynamically generated image placeholders which show the dimensions (by default). Using only the URL, you can specify size, colors and extra text as well.
Unsplash
Sometimes you want more than a simple placeholder, and you need to grab a nice photo to use in your design. Unsplash is one of the largest and more popular sites for royalty free photos. Because of this, you can go a step further and use the images from Unsplash in your final product. A great source for hero images and header images for blog posts, etc.
LoremIpsum.io
No text is quite so famous in the design world as Lorem ipsum. This Latin-like text is meant to be used as a placeholder for prose content. Unlike the same word or sentence copied over and over, this text looks more natural, providing the same feel as the end result. Grab a few words or multiple pages of this text. Some design tools have features to automatically insert lorem ipsum text into your designs.
Pravatar
Sometimes the image you need is specifically an avatar or user profile image, in that case there a number of services which cater specifically to that need, providing random faces to add to your designs. Some of these services also provide avatar placeholders for you functional applications as well, using initials, or other imagery generated based on email or other identifier.