Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
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Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#2Lorem 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.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#3I 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?
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#4Lorem 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…
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 '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.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#5The 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.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#6Lorem Ipsum = fake content.
Lorem Ipsum Tool = fake content.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#7Argh! 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.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#8Don't tell him that story about the fox and the dog.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#9Argh! 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…
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.
Re: Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool
#10Argh! 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…
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?" inst…
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.