ZURB’s flickrBomb makes your design’s placeholder images relevant

ZURB today released a new tool for web designers that provides dynamic placeholder images for your HTML mockups. But there’s a twist that gives the new tool, called flickrBomb, a leg up: the images it provides are relevant.

We’ve covered dynamic placeholder tools before. Placekitten puts images of cats wherever you need them. But flickrBomb is the first that’ll help you match your placeholder images to the topic of the site, giving you a more accurate idea of how the site will look with the sort of images it’s likely to go live with.

After all, the color palettes and other elements of, let’s say, a gaming website are completely different to those of kitten pictures.

flickrBomb is a jQuery plugin and like most dynamic placeholders, you use an <img> tag to indicate that a placeholder is needed and set the size of the image to be fetched and cropped. Only with flickrBomb, when you specify that the image is a placeholder you also include a search term, so that only relevant images are grabbed.

Here’s some example syntax:

<img src=”flickr://Kevin Bacon” width=”175px” height=”175px”>

If you’re not happy with the image that’s selected, just click on the wrench icon to select another from the search results.

Attribution features have been added to flickrBomb, which leaves me wondering if ZURB are far off an implementation that can be used to instantly provide images for blog posts on live sites.