In design, a placeholder is a temporary or dummy element that is used to represent the eventual content or structure of a design project. Placeholders are commonly used when designing layouts for print or digital media, such as brochures, websites, or presentations. They allow designers to indicate the position of certain design elements, such as logos, headlines or images, to see how the final design will look with actual content, without having to wait for the content to be created or finalised. Placeholders can take many forms, such as grey boxes, text or images that are replaced with actual content later in the design process. Using placeholders helps designers work efficiently and make design decisions based on the structure of the layout, rather than the actual content.

A typical placeholder text (also called dummy text) is Lorem ipsum.