You could use actual dummy text instead of lorem ipsum.
ie: "This is dummy text. This is a sentence that talks about sport as the copy for this section will be inserted later to discuss sport."
The purpose of lorem ipsum is to remove distractions. It's textual noise to say "here is where text will go, and how long it can be, but we're not focussing on copy at the moment".
These randomly generated actual pictures are still worth 'a thousand words', as it were, instead of saying nothing like lorem ipsum does.
I thought this might generate the equivalent to lorem ipsum text before I clicked through and was disappointed.
I have to agree. Early on in our page design, we had some nice hi-res pictures we were using as placeholders. The problem was that it made the rest of the page elements look better at first glance than they actually were. Once we knocked out the images, we realized the page looked like crap and we had to go back to the drawing board.
(not saying our page looks great now, but it's definitely progressed from some pretty ragged looking early versions)
I'm actually partial to keeping FPO images as default and gray as possible. That way everybody knows exactly what is temporary, and there is no confusion.
"Everything looks great but we're not crazy about the vegetable picture you chose."
"...Yes we agree, that is a temporary image and can be ignored."
The reason why "lorem ipsum" is latin is that since the language is almost extinct, it looks like real copy but it's very difficult that someone can send it to the printer by mistake, thinking it's the final text. (by the way, perhaps to typeset for the Vatican press they use something else...)
So, placing a real image as a placeholder is not a good idea.
Lorem Ipsum is actually abstracted one layer further. It's based on some text by Cicero, but it has been altered so it wouldn't even be readable if you knew Latin.
Part of the Lorem Ipsum from Adobe is a pseudo-latin translation of a pseudo Rudy VanderLaans text on typography, concerning the legibility of typefaces. It's a rather convoluted insider joke.
I'm a big fan of all these image generator thingos. I made yet-another-placeholder-generator too ( http://mrspeaker.github.com/lowersrc/ ). The thing I like about my one is that it's all done client-side - not all my clients have the best internets ;)
That's actually pretty cool, and would work well if you curate your own image set with a unique tag.
Otherwise, it adds a bit of risk if you have sensitive clients. "Nurse" and "nursing" can return photos of nurses at work, a nurse smoking a cigarette in an old ad, women in sexy nurse costumes, or a river otter. The quality is also extremely variable.
I second this, I use placehold.it constantly whenever I'm building with html or css. I never use the text feature like the link above, it defaults to showing the image size and I've found that to be more useful because it's a quick reference designers or project managers or anyone else can use to figure out the size requirements for that images replacement.
I can't tell you how happy I am that there is finally a placeholder image service that will serve up different images of the same size on a single page.
You could use actual dummy text instead of lorem ipsum. ie: "This is dummy text. This is a sentence that talks about sport as the copy for this section will be inserted later to discuss sport."
The purpose of lorem ipsum is to remove distractions. It's textual noise to say "here is where text will go, and how long it can be, but we're not focussing on copy at the moment".
These randomly generated actual pictures are still worth 'a thousand words', as it were, instead of saying nothing like lorem ipsum does.
I thought this might generate the equivalent to lorem ipsum text before I clicked through and was disappointed.