A discussion regarding Lorem Ipsum and its role in graphic design

Programming

Many times in graphic design and publishing, lorem ipsum is a placeholder for filler text used to demonstrate graphic elements of a design piece or website. Many designers use lorem ipsum when creating new website design mock-ups to fill in and demonstrate where the text will go in accordance to images/pictures on a page, and give it a more complete look when presenting the design. This is especially used when a client hasn’t provided yet all needed information or the exact copy hasn’t been written?

Loren ipsum is the most commonly used placeholder and filler texts for the aforementioned purposes and begins with the phrase “Lorem Ipsum” which is where it gets its name. You might have seen this on the Internet. Lorem ipsum is a distorted fragment of Cicero's philosophical Latin treatise "On the limits of good and evil", written in 45 BC.

Why Lorem Ipsum? As discussed, it is used to fill the empty space with the text that substitutes for the actual website content, yet not distracting from the overall picture, because when evaluating the design and composition of a website, the readable text will interfere with focus of evaluating the overall design. The text in Lorem ipsum is essentially absurd and unreadable text that is usually called “fish” among developers.

For example, the first paragraph of Lorem Ipsum looks like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer eu velit in velit dictum auctor. Sed condimentum elit nec libero sagittis imperdiet. In sit amet nibh ante. Suspendisse quis eros lorem. Suspendisse congue bibendum pulvinar. Quisque tempor ligula sed nulla ornare et egestas arcu mollis. Maecenas adipiscing aliquam libero non malesuada.

To generate Lorem ipsum you can use http://lipsum.com

And what about pictures? Naturally, you can look for pictures on the Internet and insert them into the website layout. But there are other convenient solutions such as http://lorempixel.com. It allows you to insert pictures of different themes and sizes into the site.
For example, if we need a 400x200px, the address of this picture will look like this: http://lorempixel.com/400/200/

You can also choose pictures from several categories of images on the subject. For example, if we need to select a category "Sports", then the address of the picture will be the following: http://lorempixel.com/400/200/sports/

You can also put text on a picture, modifying the address like here: http://lorempixel.com/400/200/sports/sample-text/

These two simple tools make it possible to save time when mocking up pages and filling them with temporary text.

See also: Generating images in PHP using gd-library

Comments