SVG as a Placeholder

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on

It wasn’t long ago when Mikael Ainalem’s Pen demonstrated how you might use SVG outlines in HTML then lazyload the image (later turned into a webpack loader by Emil Tholin). It’s kind of like a skeleton screen, in that it gives the user a hint of what’s coming. Or the blur up technique, which loads a very small image blurrily blown up as the placeholder image.

José M. Pérez documents those, plus some more basic options (nothing, an image placeholder, or a solid color), and best of all, a very clever new idea using Primitive (of which there is a mac app and JavaScript version), which creates overlapping SVG shapes to use as the placeholder image. Probably a bit bigger-in-size than some of the other techniques, but still much smaller than a high res JPG!

Direct Link →