While lorem ipsum text is useful for a variety of body text filler, it has its limits: when creating user profiles for site mockups, or filling in user registration databases with random data for testing, you need fake names, face photographs of the right size, and more. Regular random text can’t provide that… but a few specialized websites can.

Fake Name Generator creates random user profiles of people of different ethnicity, age, and location, complete with fake credit card numbers, occupations, and eMail addresses, while FakeNumber generates correct phone numbers for every US state, but ensures that they are not registered, so that no-one is disturbed if the numbers are tested.

While it produces a reduced range of data compared to Fake Name Generator, Random User includes user images, via a JavaScript API; the site also has a very useful free plugin that fills the same task in Adobe PhotoShop. UI Names generates just one name at a time for different genders.

UIFaces by Caleb Ogden generates random image avatars at sizes you determine, while Sarah Paramenter has a downloadable pack of avatars for PSD and web comps.

If you're a Sketch user, this content generator plugin can generate avatars, names, and filler text.

If you need something more dynamic, there’s also Francois Zaninotto’s Faker, a PHP script that will create user profiles en masse, including name, contact details and business information. There’s also a JavaScript version, which uses Node to generate similar data.

While it is not technically a profile generator, the very useful generated data can create tables filled with faked personal information, in formats for HTML, SQL, JSON and more.

Resources like this are fairly rare and hard to find, so if you know of any others, please share them in the comments!

Photograph of Sarah Parmenter by Craig & Kate

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