Another Free Way to Generate Placeholder Art for Your Web Site or Documents
Do you sometimes need to prop up a draft document with a placeholder image while you're waiting for the final art to come back from a production artist or legal review? Last week I told you about the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator, a site that generates placeholder images to order. Afterwards, reader Tim W. clued me in to an alternative site that creates colorful placeholders you might want to try instead.
The Random Image Generator takes a width and height, and spits out a perfectly sized placeholder image in one of eight color schemes. All of the color swatches are tasteful abstract patterns designed to complement the color theme of your page.
Once you ask for your image, it appears on the page -- just copy and paste it into your existing project.
Unfortunately, as much as I like the colorful treatment (as opposed to the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator's battleship gray boxes), these images don't contain their dimensions helpfully stamped in the center. Nor can you automatically generate an image just by building the dimensions into a URL. Bottom line: Dynamic Dummy Image Generator still wins for convenience and flexibility, but Random Image Generator is a good choice if aesthetics are a higher priority.
