When I first started working in a true creative industry, it took a little time to understand the value of good copy writing. Along the way, I found out about something called “Lorem Ipsum” text, or placeholder copy, mostly used in creative design, publishing and development to show what blocks of text would look like when placed on the web page or print item until proper copy could be produced. This fake copy looks like the real thing, and gives a sense of the overall visual layout for the finished creative. It looks kind of like Latin, but it is not. When a web page needs this kind of treatment, I usually find this Lorem Ipsum Generator to do the trick quite nicely.
When blocks of images need to be displayed in layout, the normal method for design is to use FPO, or “For Placement Only” images. This is an image either from a graphic warehouse like iStockPhoto or Getty with the watermark left on. Sometimes it is a blank image with FPO in big bold letters displayed over the top. This works well in design, but when these images come over to development for coding, it can be tiresome to export these temporary images for placeholders until they are replaced with the final approved versions.
Enter the genius Dummy Image Generator. It’s like the “Lorem Ipsum” for images!
Here’s a simple example on how to use it (this is the same example used at the top of this post).
<img src="http://dummyimage.com/300x160" alt="placeholder" />
That’s it. Find the location you want to insert a dummy image, add the IMG tag with a source pointing to dummyimage.com, followed by the width and height of the image needed (separated by a lower-case “x”).
The service is free to use, and it will save you some real time when coding your next web project with fluctuating design elements and/or client image approval schedules.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the original posting on this.
