Lorem ipsum is valuable precisely because it is meaningless. It is designed to fill space without distracting a pedantic reader who will inevitably find misspellings and glitches in any preliminary body copy.
It is also really easy to find out if you've left lorem ipsum in your production directory -- one line of grep is all it takes. If you use any other form of fake copy, good luck to you making sure it's all gone before your site goes into production.
Indeed, in '98 our application was put onto an IBM demo disk of Java applications - we were a VC funded startup and I was the CTO.
After we had sent them the stuff to include on the disk a very worried developer came to me and told me that "some of <deleted>'s test data went to IBM". The test data in question had been sourced from some particularly unpleasant alt. newsgroups.
I had a genuine "my career is over" moment...
Turns out that the only data that got sent out was a reference to the word "sheep" in an search index. That was all.
I've tended to be quite careful about test data since then.
I don't think you can do away with five hundred or so years of typographic history that easily. The use of Lorem Ipsum and the first Oration against Catiline came through need, not through a desire to flaunt random Latin texts. There is a definite need for filler text that doesn't distract as one finishes a design. If leaving lipsum text up in a live design is a problem, the solution is to replace it with real content, not replacing it with more dummy content. At least lipsum is recognisable as such. Wouldn't it worse if a user took the content for real?
The article makes the following (rather weak) points against Lorem Ipsum:
1) Nonsensical Handwaving such as "you'll feel more inspired with real content" and "Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design."
2) "it will take 5 minutes to explain to confused team mates and clients".
3) You might forget to replace the Lorem Ipsum dummy text
The tool doesn't seem to fix any of these. Instead it makes them worse, because it makes the dummy content look like real content.
“When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design.”
That’s just so wrong. Line heights, line lengths, fonts, font sizes and margins are vitally import visual properties of your website. If you want to make sure that you picked the correct values for those properties and if you don’t yet have copy, you should use Lorem Ipsum. Text is certainly not just a visual element but it is also a visual element.
You diminish the importance of copy if you insert some crappy boilerplate stuff which has really nothing to do with your client. Lorem Ipsum is a clear signal that the copy is not yet finished and needs to be finished.
“By adding Lorem Ipsum to the design you are essentially dressing your king before you know his size.”
You can decide which colors and fabrics to use before you know the king’s size.
There certainly are situations where the copy has to be known before you can start laying out elements (forms are a example), but in those cases you shouldn’t use boilerplate, you should use the real copy! You actually need to!
“The point I tried to make is that you and your clients need to be thinking, understanding and gathering content before the design. Using Lorem Ipsum is a way to half-heartedly go about the most important part of your site.”
And crappy boilerplate stuff will make that point … how exactly? At worst clients will just take the boilerplate, change a few words and leave it at that. Lorem Ipsum is a powerful reminder that text is important! Clients often don’t get that, that’s certainly true, but the best remedy for that is telling them – again and again – not changing the filler text.
(And, as was already said here, searching for Lorem Ipsum is hell of a lot easier than searching for crappy boilerplate stuff.)
The biggest problem with Lorem Ipsum is that it’s pseudo Latin and as such doesn’t have the same word lengths or letter frequencies as English. None of this nonsense, though.
I would argue that neither of you truly understand the problem with Lorem Ipsum. Content should drive the design of a website. All too often web designers create a proof while also deciding roughly what content goes where. The creative process should not only begin with fonts, colors, layout, etc but also with content. You should begin your website process with general questions like "What are we trying to say?" instead of "We need a website with a boilerplate feel".
Switching the copy from Lorem to boilderplate makes it even worse.
I completely agree with you but sometimes you have no other choice than to use filler. Lorem Ipsum should be rarely used but the proposed solution to the problem is a travesty.
That’s just so wrong. Line heights, line lengths, fonts, font sizes and margins are vitally import visual properties of your website. If you want to make sure that you picked the correct values for those properties and if you don’t yet have copy, you should use Lorem Ipsum. Text is certainly not just a visual element but it is also a visual element.
The important point is that lorem ipsum is not content, rather, it is a tool for approximating the aesthetic of content that might be placed there in the future.
Nobody is saying that design begins with fonts/layout/color (although that does happen at times), rather, that when you get to a point where you need to decide how bodies of text will look, you use things like lorem ipsum to approximate how other text will behave within that field.
The other thing about lorem ipsum, which you may be missing and the op certainly misses, is that by not actually being english, you don't get hung up on the meaning of the content, rather, you can pseudo-objectively evaluate the aesthetic choices used to set the text. again, the whole point is to create a template for setting actual text very well.
the largest problem with lorem ipsum is people using it who don't understand why they are using it. I think that using dummy copy that looks like legitimate content is more harmful than using random latin. At least with real latin, you don't delude yourself into thinking that it's anything other than text used to decide formal typographic or layout choices.
I find that using more realistic content is a great help in web design and development since it's easier to understand and "feel" the final web experience. A site filled with Lorem Ipsum to me is like a portrait of a person where the pupils are missing, it's lifeless.
What I typically do is that when I work on a site about music, I'll just find some similar sites and take images and text from there that is a close match to what will eventually be used in the project. Especially for bigger projects and content-driven sites, where the client will later add the final stuff via their CMS, this works great (especially when you have otherwise only cat pictures and "this is a test" text that some dev added).
Seems like people have different experience, but I find using more realistic content a great help for everybody involved, since it simply makes the site more real and therefore it's easier to make it better.
Ever seen those psychological tests that have word "RED" printed in blue ink, the word "BLUE" in yellow ink, and so forth? The test is to say the color, not the word. Most people find it difficult and irritating, because the verbal parts of their brains hijack the process and insist on reading the words.
The point of using meaningless text is to quiet the verbal parts of your brain, so you can become conscious of the abstract visual and aesthetic elements.
The converse is also true. Design of the verbal elements has to use meaningful text, preferably in a context where the visual and aesthetic design has been toned down to not distract. Hence the popularity of monochrome wire-frame mockups for document design.
Long story short: It depends on what you're designing.
There are times when using Lorem Ipsum hurts you. There are many times when it does not.
God save us from designers and developers who suddenly realize that maybe not everything they do is ideal, and then feel the need to crusade to bring the unbearably terrible designers/developers up to nearly-palatable mediocre, instead of focusing on their own work to improve it from pretty good to excellent.
I agree that Lorem ipsum shouldn't be used as a replacement for instructions but it does have its place in prototyping.
Lorem ipsum is tremendously useful as placeholders for content types such of sample blog posts, sample description etc. These content are irrelevant to the web developer.
So how is this a tool?
It seems to "generate" the same text everytime I press the button. So 5 static HTML-Pages could do the same. Or am I missing something?
15 comments
[ 135 ms ] story [ 2156 ms ] threadIt is also really easy to find out if you've left lorem ipsum in your production directory -- one line of grep is all it takes. If you use any other form of fake copy, good luck to you making sure it's all gone before your site goes into production.
After we had sent them the stuff to include on the disk a very worried developer came to me and told me that "some of <deleted>'s test data went to IBM". The test data in question had been sourced from some particularly unpleasant alt. newsgroups.
I had a genuine "my career is over" moment...
Turns out that the only data that got sent out was a reference to the word "sheep" in an search index. That was all.
I've tended to be quite careful about test data since then.
1) Nonsensical Handwaving such as "you'll feel more inspired with real content" and "Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design."
2) "it will take 5 minutes to explain to confused team mates and clients".
3) You might forget to replace the Lorem Ipsum dummy text
The tool doesn't seem to fix any of these. Instead it makes them worse, because it makes the dummy content look like real content.
“When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design.”
That’s just so wrong. Line heights, line lengths, fonts, font sizes and margins are vitally import visual properties of your website. If you want to make sure that you picked the correct values for those properties and if you don’t yet have copy, you should use Lorem Ipsum. Text is certainly not just a visual element but it is also a visual element.
You diminish the importance of copy if you insert some crappy boilerplate stuff which has really nothing to do with your client. Lorem Ipsum is a clear signal that the copy is not yet finished and needs to be finished.
“By adding Lorem Ipsum to the design you are essentially dressing your king before you know his size.”
You can decide which colors and fabrics to use before you know the king’s size.
There certainly are situations where the copy has to be known before you can start laying out elements (forms are a example), but in those cases you shouldn’t use boilerplate, you should use the real copy! You actually need to!
“The point I tried to make is that you and your clients need to be thinking, understanding and gathering content before the design. Using Lorem Ipsum is a way to half-heartedly go about the most important part of your site.”
And crappy boilerplate stuff will make that point … how exactly? At worst clients will just take the boilerplate, change a few words and leave it at that. Lorem Ipsum is a powerful reminder that text is important! Clients often don’t get that, that’s certainly true, but the best remedy for that is telling them – again and again – not changing the filler text.
(And, as was already said here, searching for Lorem Ipsum is hell of a lot easier than searching for crappy boilerplate stuff.)
The biggest problem with Lorem Ipsum is that it’s pseudo Latin and as such doesn’t have the same word lengths or letter frequencies as English. None of this nonsense, though.
Switching the copy from Lorem to boilderplate makes it even worse.
The important point is that lorem ipsum is not content, rather, it is a tool for approximating the aesthetic of content that might be placed there in the future.
Nobody is saying that design begins with fonts/layout/color (although that does happen at times), rather, that when you get to a point where you need to decide how bodies of text will look, you use things like lorem ipsum to approximate how other text will behave within that field.
The other thing about lorem ipsum, which you may be missing and the op certainly misses, is that by not actually being english, you don't get hung up on the meaning of the content, rather, you can pseudo-objectively evaluate the aesthetic choices used to set the text. again, the whole point is to create a template for setting actual text very well.
the largest problem with lorem ipsum is people using it who don't understand why they are using it. I think that using dummy copy that looks like legitimate content is more harmful than using random latin. At least with real latin, you don't delude yourself into thinking that it's anything other than text used to decide formal typographic or layout choices.
What I typically do is that when I work on a site about music, I'll just find some similar sites and take images and text from there that is a close match to what will eventually be used in the project. Especially for bigger projects and content-driven sites, where the client will later add the final stuff via their CMS, this works great (especially when you have otherwise only cat pictures and "this is a test" text that some dev added).
Seems like people have different experience, but I find using more realistic content a great help for everybody involved, since it simply makes the site more real and therefore it's easier to make it better.
Ever seen those psychological tests that have word "RED" printed in blue ink, the word "BLUE" in yellow ink, and so forth? The test is to say the color, not the word. Most people find it difficult and irritating, because the verbal parts of their brains hijack the process and insist on reading the words.
The point of using meaningless text is to quiet the verbal parts of your brain, so you can become conscious of the abstract visual and aesthetic elements.
The converse is also true. Design of the verbal elements has to use meaningful text, preferably in a context where the visual and aesthetic design has been toned down to not distract. Hence the popularity of monochrome wire-frame mockups for document design.
Edited.
There are times when using Lorem Ipsum hurts you. There are many times when it does not.
God save us from designers and developers who suddenly realize that maybe not everything they do is ideal, and then feel the need to crusade to bring the unbearably terrible designers/developers up to nearly-palatable mediocre, instead of focusing on their own work to improve it from pretty good to excellent.
Lorem ipsum is tremendously useful as placeholders for content types such of sample blog posts, sample description etc. These content are irrelevant to the web developer.