“Is that Greek?”

Imagine you’re a client eagerly about to review Hile’s proposed design for a new website. You click on the link we’ve given you and there on your screen you see a mocked-up web page featuring clean, stylish design, a just-right photo for your banner image and … wait a minute. What the heck? In place of where the copy should go you see this:

Where you thought you’d see words somehow related to your company’s industry or purpose, there in its place is what appears to be a long, lost Romance language. You rack your brain trying to decipher what is now taking the place of the expected text. Of course, the words (if you can call them that) are there to show you how the page will look with copy and, unfortunately, hold as much meaning as a baby’s babble.

What Lorem Ipsum basically comes down to is designing and organizing a website, brochure, etc. that visually looks like the finished product. It doesn’t distract the viewer with actual copy, and the letters are spaced out well enough so that it appears on the page just as intelligible English would. 

If Lorem Ipsum is simply a way to take up space, why not use something less cryptic? Wouldn’t a series of “blah blah blahs” do the same job? Not really. And let’s face it, seeing “content here, content here” all over a design comp (short for “composite,” advertising jargon for a preview or mock-up) can be about as boring as the drone of a person who gets up to the microphone and repeats ”check 1, 2, 3.”

Besides, why alter a dummy text that has survived for over five centuries and made the jump from standard printing to electronic typesetting*? Let’s show Lorem Ipsum a little respect here.

Way More Than a Placeholder

While Lorem Ipsum is not a language itself, most clients are not far off in assuming that it is. While it would be fun to say that we just bang on the keyboard and call it Lorem Ipsum, the placeholder text actually comes from The Extremes of Good and Evil, a book written in Latin by Cicero in 45 BC*. So the next time you’re on a website that sells toilet seat covers or the like, remember that Lorem Ipsum, that shout-out to one of the greatest Roman philosophers, held the place where the description of the latest cartoon soft seat now sits.

Lorem Ipsum has come a long way since the pages of Cicero, though. Today it is even built into most publishing software and can be found online through numerous text generators. If people are going to use dummy text they want the good stuff.

For those familiar with Lorem Ipsum, it has become a sort of inside joke, spawning numerous text generators that morph Lorem Ipsum into humorous, thematic dummy texts. These include Gangsta Ipsum, Pseudo German Ipsum, Marketing Ipsum, plenty of food-oriented placeholder texts, and, our favorite, Hipster Ipsum, Who wouldn’t want a dummy text that uses words like “sustainable,” “cardigan,” and “banksy?”

Lorem Ipsum Generator Sites to Tickle Your Fancy

• hipsteripsum.me
• tlipsum.appspot.com (Yorkshire Ipsum)
• www.lorizzle.nl/ (Lorizzle my dizzle fo shizzle)
• www.duckisland.com/GreekMachine.asp (We like the “Psuedo-German” and “Marketing”)

Apparently food Ipsums are popular:

• baconipsum.com
• tunaipsum.com
• veggieipsum.com
• beeripsum.com

Alternative to latin-ish Ipsums:

• www.cameroncreative.com/filler-text.html (Check out the “Terms & Conditions”)
• chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama (Monty Python filler? Yes please.)
• www.fillerati.com
• slipsum.com/lite.html

With that, I will leave you with these kind words: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras imperdiet. (Let’s pretend that means “So long, have a good day. Thanks for reading.”)

* Fact and figures according to www.lipsum.com

Tags: beginner, lorem ipsum, lorem ipsum generators, lorem ipsum translation, placeholder text, typography, website development

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 11:35 am and is filed under Fun, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.