A Better Lorem Ipsum

I know this sounds crazy-obsessive on my part, but well…I admit to being crazy-obsessive. :)

Using normal Lorem Ipsum in my design comps has never really been fully, totally, utterly satisfactory for me. I mean, it’s good enough but not awesome. If you’re a designer, I know you know that feeling.

The whole point of Lorem Ipsum is to insert text into a work-in-progress design that sits perfectly in between the familiar and the foreign: it can’t be actual English because the client might get distracted and think the words shown will be the final copy used — yet it can’t be a true foreign language, either, because…

1. the client might actually speak said language and get distracted and
2. it might look so foreign that the client will think the copy will actually end up being written in that language. (If you think that’s a bit silly, then you haven’t spent any time working with real clients. ;)

The problem I’ve always had with Lorem Ipsum is that it still doesn’t look familiar enough to me. It’s always kind of bothered me a bit, and I often found myself inserting more English-like words into my Lorem Ipsum to achieve the effect that I wanted.

Crazy? Yeah, I already said I was ;)

Therefore, I would like to propose a new version of Lorem Ipsum for English-speaking clients. There are phrases that we use often in English that are actually Latin — not Latin-based, not derived from Latin, not even reminiscent of it — but the real deal.

Funny thing is, when you string all of these phrases together into a sentence, and multiple sentences to form a paragraph, you get the same kind of effect that Lorem Ipsum has, but with more of an immediate familiarity. Some may argue that this defeats the purpose of placeholder text — that it shouldn’t be this familiar.

Well, I say: why not? Now you’ve got two options.