Dummyimage.com Gets New Features

Ever since the surge of interest in my pet project dummyimage.com I’ve been meaning to add some new features. Today is the International Day of Awesomeness (which coincides with Chuck Norris’ birthday) and I couldn’t think of a better time to unveil DummyImage.com‘s new functionality to the public.

a 600x200 Dummy Image

Here is a run down of the changes:

Specify Custom Colors

You can choose the background and foreground colors of the dummy image right in the url using a 6,3,2, or even 1 character hexcode. Don’t worry if you forget to do this as dummy image will default to gray and black.

Add Your Own Text

A lot of people wanted to be able to add their own text to a dummy image to better communicate what it is representing. Now using the &text= parameter you can.

A Better Typeface

Arial be damned! Font geeks cringed at my basic choice of a font. Some seemed worried about my distribution of the most popular font on Earth. Now both camps can be happy as I’m now using the completely free and open M+ Font. I also changed the X in the middle of the images to a multiplication sign × as pointed out by Erinah and Dave Cortright.

Standard Image Sizes

Dummyimage.com is a useful prototyping tool and a lot of prototypes and wireframes have ad positions. Instead of memorizing dimensions you can now bring up ad sizes by their industry-standard name like largerectangle, skyscraper, and fullbanner. You can even customize the colors, text, and formats of theses sizes as well.

Pick Your Format

Before you could add any image format extension to the url but my script would still generate a GIF image everytime. Now you can generate proper PNG, JPG, and GIF images and drag them into another app trouble free.

Happy Birthday Chuck Norris

And with these new features I figured it was time to give the site a proper, though still simple, design. Rather than bury how these features work in long, boring text I made a little tool that shows you everything you need to know with minimal fuss.

Not a fan of change? Don’t worry, you can still use Dummyimage.com to generate place holder images exactly the same way you have always been doing it.

So thank you to everyone who has e-mailed me, tweeted me, left a comment on a post somewhere or otherwise provided feedback on dummyimage.com. I’m glad so many people found it as useful as I think it is. Keep the ideas and dummyimage variations coming. I’m sure this thing could be better.

9 Responses to “ Dummyimage.com Gets New Features ”

  1. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to allow caching on the images (using proper headers)?

    Reply

    Russell Heimlich responded on March 11th, 2010:

    Hmmm something like adding ETags and Future Expires headers? I’ll look into that.

  2. The simplicity and utility of this site makes me happy.

    Reply

    Russell Heimlich responded on March 24th, 2010:

    The fact that you took the time to leave a comment on my otherwise bare blog, makes me happy.

  3. Hi author! Can I, take pics from your website for my degree work?

    Reply

  4. Does Dummyimage support line breaks for the custom text, and if not, will it ever? Thanks for all the great work work. I use this web app all the time.

    Reply

    Russell Heimlich responded on January 21st, 2011:

    You can use a pipe character | to force a line break but it has trouble centering the text then.

    http://dummyimage.com/600×.....text=hello|world

    One of these days I may get around to fix it. Thanks for your question.

  5. […] March 10th, 2010, (Chuck Norris’ Birthday & International Day of Awesomeness) I launched version 2 of dummyimage.com.This added color options, the ability to customize the text displayed on the image, and a simple […]

  6. Nice features it have got

    Reply

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