A story today in Co.Design, a sub set of Fast Company, had us scratching our collective heads. Boom has created a text generator that replaces lorem ipsum with topical text. If you’re creating a restaurant page you can fill it with text about food. Sounds nifty.
There’s a rash of other generators out ther that have trickled across our transom of late, like Bacon Ipsum, Cat Ipsum, Bob Ross Ipsum etc. But using one that generates text that is related to the subject at hand seems to miss the fundamental points of using “greek” text (latin, actually) in the first place.
“Everything is happy if you choose to make it that way. Now let’s put some happy little clouds in here. You are only limited by your imagination.” – sample from Bob Ross Ipsum
When proofing designs, viewers are easily distracted by reading “real” text. It robs their attention away from the task at hand, which is reviewing the design. Have you ever had a client pause to ask “it’s not going to say that on the final ad, is it?” This shows how important it is to not have readable text in mock ups.
Another key feature of using lorem ipsum is exactly that. It ensures that no text from the mockup stage makes it through production untouched. If someone is proofing a document along any stage of the design and edit process, and they come across a paragraph about food, it makes it much more difficult to tell if it is approved copy or placeholder text.
Ultimately it is a waste of time and resources. Couldn’t you be working on improving the design and layout instead of fretting over a non-issue design problem that was solved centuries ago. Go disrupt something else.
Read the original story at fastcodesign.com:
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90177380/finally-a-smarter-alternative-to-lorem-ipsum
And yet… people still manage to leave Lorem Ipsum on their website, which looks unprofessional. At least any mistakes would be industry relevant, no?
Agreed that greeked text on a live site is unprofessional and confusing to viewers. The related text could be relevant or it could be misleading, which is worse. Though I guess you could make the case that happy little quotes from Bob Ross might be appropriate just about anywhere. Ahem.
The client is going to look at the whole design, words, warts and all.
Lorem Ipsum robs us designers of the chance to design around real-world grammatical structures and lets us idealise things to a point that they suffer when the real content comes flowing in. Tools like this help, because, whilst they’re not a totally accurate reflection, they are at least a bit closer to the end result. I think it also has the benefit that being able to tell them you considered their industry before just pumping any old dummy text in there lets them know you’re thinking about the end game.
Lorum Ipsum throws a lot of clients in the SME sector, because they wonder why ‘there is latin everywhere’ . I’d say that ultimately, it’s up to designers to have enough of a read on their client about how much of this sort of ‘help ‘ they’re going to need to be sold on a project.
Having more than one approach to dummy text opens up your options to cater to different clients in different ways. Why close the door on freebies that diversify your toolset?