Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool

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.

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.