Lorem Ipsum – “Say What?”

What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum, also known as “greeking” in the design industry, is simply dummy text that is used as a placeholder for the actual text that will fill a certain area of a design.

Blocks of text are essentially visual elements in a design. They are groupings of smaller shapes that make up larger ones visually. It is extremely important to keep this in mind when designing, because you may run into a problem when the Lorem Ipsum you’re using does not match the word count of the actual text that is coming from the client. You might have a beautiful design in the beginning and in the end have to redesign entire areas to fit your content.

Think of page layout being similar to putting a puzzle together. If you are missing pieces of the puzzle, it is much harder to put together and can be quite a headache for the designer and later, the client. If there are spaces that are detrimental to the design, then it is all important to acquire the actual text that will be used before starting the layout process. In some cases, the client may be working on the content and can only give an idea of the word count that will be used. That’s when Lorem Ipsum comes in handy!

Another useful attribute of Lorem Ipsum for designers is that clients won’t get hung-up on whether or not you spelled “the” correctly. They may have the urge to read and make comments that are not directly related to the design. Lorem Ipsum keeps everyone on the same page and allows the creativity of a design to be noticed.