

Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool - iwani
http://kureno.com/blog/death-to-lorem-ipsum-the-story-behind-our-app-lorem-ipsum-tool/

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ugh
Argh! Someone really doesn’t understand Lorem Ipsum.

 _“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.

~~~
josefresco
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.

~~~
nsfmc
_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.

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slapshot
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.

~~~
arethuza
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.

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wcoenen
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.

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miri
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?

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GBKS
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.

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tengkahwee
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.

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growt
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?

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lovskogen
Lorem Ipsum = fake content. Lorem Ipsum Tool = fake content.

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jrockway
Don't tell him that story about the fox and the dog.

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ahoyhere
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.

------
Daniel_Newby
Fail.

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.

