colors, no layout, no styles, all those things that convey the important signals that go

beyond the mere textual, hierarchies of information, weight, emphasis, oblique stresses,

priorities, all those subtle cues that also have visual and emotional appeal to the reader.

Rigid proponents of content strategy may shun the use of dummy copy but then

designers might want to ask them to provide style sheets with the copy decks they

supply that are in tune with the design direction they require.

Or else, an alternative route: set checkpoints, networks, processes, junctions between

content and layout. Depending on the state of affairs it may be fine to concentrate

either on design or content, reversing gears when needed.

Luke Wroblewski, currently a Product Director at Google, holds that fake data can break

down in real life:

Using dummy content or fake information in the Web design process can result in products

with unrealistic assumptions and potentially serious design flaws. A seemingly elegant

design can quickly begin to bloat with unexpected content or break under the weight of

actual activity. Fake data can ensure a nice looking layout but it doesn’t reflect what a

living, breathing application must endure. Real data does.

Websites in professional use templating systems. Commercial publishing platforms and

content management systems ensure that you can show different text, different data

using the same template. When it's about controlling hundreds of articles, product

pages for web shops, or user profiles in social networks, all of them potentially with

different sizes, formats, rules for differing elements things can break, designs agreed

upon can have unintended consequences and look much different than expected.

This is quite a problem to solve, but just doing without greeking text won't fix it. Using

test items of real content and data in designs will help, but there's no guarantee that

every oddity will be found and corrected. Do you want to be sure? Then a prototype or

beta site with real content published from the real CMS is needed—but you’re not going

that far until you go through an initial design cycle.

Lorem Ipsum actually is usefull in the design stage as it focuses our attention on places

where the content is a dynamic block coming from the CMS (unlike static content

elements that will always stay the same.) Blocks of Lorem Ipsum with a character count

range provide a obvious reminder to check and re-check that the design and the content

model match up.

 Kyle Fiedler from the Design Informer feels that distracting copy is your fault:

If the copy becomes distracting in the design then you are doing something wrong or they

are discussing copy changes. It might be a bit annoying but you could tell them that that

discussion would be best suited for another time. At worst the discussion is at least

working towards the final goal of your site where questions about lorem ipsum don’t.

Summing up, if the copy is diverting attention from the design it’s because it’s

not up to task.

Typographers of yore didn't come up with the concept of dummy copy because people

thought that content is inconsequential window dressing, only there to be used by

designers who can’t be bothered to read. Lorem Ipsum is needed because words matter,

a lot. Just fill up a page with draft copy about the client’s business and they will actually

read it and comment on it. They will be drawn to it, fiercely. Do it the wrong way and

draft copy can derail your design review.

Asking the client to pay no attention Lorem Ipsum isn't hard as it doesn’t make sense in

the first place, that will limit any initial interest soon enough. Try telling a client to

ignore draft copy however, and you're up to something you can't win. Whenever draft

copy comes up in a meeting confused questions about it ensue.

Summing up, really:

Lorem Ipsum is a tool that can be useful, used intentionally it may help solve some

problems. If you go about content strategy the wrong way, fix that problem.

Lorem Ipsum plugins: editors

 Notepad++

 For notepad++, a Windows text editor, the InsertLoremIpsumNppPlugin can be

downloaded at twenfour.com. It generates and inserts Lorem Ipsum, either as

words, sentences, or paragraphs. The installation requires to copy the

file InsertLoremIpsumNppPlugin.dll and the Config directory (both are contained

in the zip file) to the "plugins" subdirectory of the Notepad++ installation

directory. Afterwards, a new option "InsertLoremIpsum" will show in the

"plugin" menu entry. A restart may be required. >> screenshots

 ToolBucket: This plugin allows for base 64 encoding, it has a change indentation
dialog, it generates Lorem Ipsum and has many more features.
  Sublime Text

 Insert lorem and press the tab key, this will insert a Lorem Ipsum
paragraph. lorem200 + tab will add 200 words.

 Lorem Ipsum generator: A plugin by Emmet, an toolkit for web-developers. After

installation type lorem or lipsum, this will generate a 30-words dummy text,

splitted into a few sentences. You can also use it inside repeated elements to

create tags filled with completely random sentences. For

example, p*4>lorem would generate 4 paragraphs with greeking

text. ul.generic-list>lorem10.item*4 will generate an unordered list with the

class name "generic-list" that contains 4 list items with ten words of Lorem

Ipsum each.

 LoremIpsum: A plugin for Sublime Editor 2 and 3 from billymoon hosted at

github.com. It allows to insert Lorem Ipsum in the editor via menu items or

keyboard shortcuts. Select how much text you want from the menu item in Edit-

>Text->Lorem Ipsum or in the right click menu in Lorem Ipsum. Press the

shortcut key (Alt+Shift+L) to add Lorem Ipsum text. Keep pressing to add

more.

 Geany: GeanyLipsum is a plugin for Windows and Linux. It inserts Lorem Ipsum
copy with a length of 1 to 5,000 chars and provides a keyboard shortcut.

Do you know of other plugins? Please tell us.