How I learned to stop using Lorem Ipsum and love placeholder text
If you’re reading this, chances are you know what Lorem Ipsum is and you’ve probably used it yourself. I’m guilty of the same, mainly because of its surprisingly convenient nature. It has been used by designers for more than half a century and it still might look like the most sensible choice for placeholder text.
Nowadays, there are a myriad of tools that make using Lorem Ipsum very easy in every design and development workflow. Placeholder text, a practical replacement for your project’s actual content, can be available to you within a few clicks. While this can save a lot of time, there’s an inherent problem with Lorem Ipsum — unless the actual content of your project is going to be a bastardized version of Cicero’s works, it might not be the best choice.
Dog Latin
According to Wikipedia, Lorem Ipsum is
typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.
So that’s not just a dead language, but a randomized imitation of one. Why do we keep testing layouts that will eventually feature content in a real language with a stream of gibberish? Using any other language in its place would be better — rarely ideal, but still better.
Think of it this way: you’ve probably heard the saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Suppose we really had selected just one language to use for placeholder text. If we had stuck with Zulu or Latvian, it would look and feel different from the actual content in most cases, but if you happened to work on a project in one of these languages, just like the stopped clock, it would be just right. It seems to me if you apply the same to Lorem Ipsum, it’s not even a stopped clock — it’s a clock face with no hands to show the time.
Language diversity
There are roughly 6000–7000 spoken languages in existence right now. There’s no consensus on how many of these have a written form, but “a lot” is a good ballpark figure.
Those written languages use wildly different alphabets, some more or less resembling the Latin script, others completely unrelated to it. Alphabets from separate cultures contain characters based on very different shapes, physical tools, vocal patterns and cultural traditions.
The different shapes of the characters and the various ways they’re used to make up words can make the text look different in every language.
Using Lorem Ipsum would give a decent representation of a design that will feature text in many of the languages using the Latin script, which is the most popular in written languages worldwide. However, any placeholder text using Latin script wouldn’t be particularly useful for languages using the Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari or Cyrillic writing systems (or any other for that matter). These last four scripts are the most widely used in the world after the Latin script.
Vanilla
Let’s just focus on Latin script languages for a moment — after all, it seems that’s the only place where Lorem Ipsum could really be useful. While that’s true for languages that use just the Latin script in its plain form (like English), many rely on ligatures, additional letters (like ß) or diacritic characters. The latter include accents, umlauts, cedillas and many more.
When these components are added to the regular latin letters, they significantly change the appearance of words, but also the constrain within which you are working.
Lorem Ipsum uses all the letters of the Latin alphabet in their plain and simple form. No accents, no cedillas, no umlauts, no circumflexes and no other type of weird marks around the letters. Without these specific elements, the placeholder text won’t look like the actual content.
Sound of the grammar police
The different grammatical rules and sentence structures of languages can also lead to a different appearance on the text. Below is a very simple example of how different the same sentence can look in a few languages.
Even with a simple example you can that languages that have different rules for forming sentences, stating actions and relationships, have tangible differences in appearance. These differences often deepen with longer and more complex text.
Unfortunately, almost all the sentences in Lorem Ipsum Look similar to each other and don’t resemble the rhythm of a real language. They’re never too long, very rarely too short, the punctuation is arbitrary and there’s no real sense of natural sentence structure and variety.
Style and context
Language is not the only variable that changes the appearance of text — the type of writing and the author’s personal style can lead to significant differences as well. If we compared 2000 words of FAQ to some software documentation of the same length, we’d see significant differences.
Other types of content like news articles have a more traditional text structure, but often contain, according to the subject, some amount of numbers, proper names and specific signs (like currency symbols or percent signs). What about an interview or some tooltips in an app?
The wide variety of content types means a wide variety of needs, priorities, sentence structures and specific patterns. My personal experience has shown that those specific needs can’t always be met by placeholder text that doesn’t feature numbers, many punctuations marks and special characters.
The personal style of different authors rarely leads to major variations, but in some cases it might be something else to consider when choosing placeholder text.
So what to do?
I’ve found that taking a bit extra time to pick good placeholder text can really speed up the rest of your design process. Working closer to the structure and appearance of the final content allows you to make more adequate decisions with less trial and error.
Here are some alternative tools and methods you can try. I’d love to know if you find them useful or if you have other ideas for a Lorem Ipsum replacement.
Wikipedia
If the product you’re designing aims to inform on a particular subject in a long-form publication, your best bet probably is to copy a Wikipedia article on that subject.
Encyclopedia texts have a suitable sentence structure for the purpose and contain the main terms related to the subject. You can employ this method with equal success for very broad and very specific subjects.
You don’t necessarily have to use Wikipedia, just find some content with a similar structure. For example, if the content of your project is outlining the history of a company that’s not old or popular enough to have a Wikipedia article, try to use the biography of a band. It will still contain plenty of dates, names of people and product (album and tour) names.
Copycat
Similarly to the previous method, this involves copying existing content that serves the same purpose as the copy in your design. Think about the actual content you’re choosing placeholder text for and find something that answers the same questions.
Not Lorem Ipsum
NotLoremIpsum.com is a great tool for placeholder text suitable for a variety of use case, subjects and industries. They also give you pointers on specific characters and patterns to look out for in each case.
Make it up
If the placeholder text you need is pretty short (and specific), the quickest thing you can do is write it yourself. Try to keep it fairly simple and keep in mind the type of content. This is quicker and easier than it might seem at first.
If you find you need some longer copy, it’s okay to repeat a sentence more than once or add a few that are not on the subject. It won’t affect the final outcome significantly and I’m sure anything you come up with beats “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”.
Technical tips
Finally, here are some tools that can help you use the methods I describe above more quickly and efficiently than just copy-pasting the content.
Craft for Sketch
Craft is a set of Sketch plugins from InVision LABS. Their data option is particularly useful for placeholder text and images. You can use it to import data from the web (great for pulling data from Wikipedia or copying a similar site). You can also feed it with real data from your own library or pick some content on a few predefined subjects.
I’ve experienced a fair amount of bugs and crashes with Craft, but even with them, it’s a very useful and time-saving tool.
Import.io
Import.io is a powerful data extraction tool that allows to collect data from the web and use it however you like. It’s especially useful for website redesigns or featuring external content.
PS: Dear screen reader users, I apologize for the lack of ALT text describing the images used here — Medium still doesn’t support that. Rest assured that those visuals are atmospheric and shouldn’t influence your understanding of the article.
