The Rock Creek Blog // Industry News, Trends & Insights
Lorem Ipsum: Friend or Enemy?
Posted by: Natalya Minkovsky, Director of Strategy & User Experience Nov 08, 2010 3 Comments
Working in marketing and design, we’ve gotten used to answering questions like, “Why is the copy on my website/brochure/ad in Latin?” and “The website is going to be in English when we launch, right?”
Why are clients asking these questions? Lorem ipsum. If you’re a content strategist reading this, you probably just groaned.
Along with FAQs, lorem ipsum has become a controversial topic both in the industry and here at Rock Creek. Lorem ipsum, or greeking, is the practice of using placeholder text—typically using a section of Latin text by Cicero but altered to make it nonsensical—instead of real content.
[An aside: Why is it called greeking if it’s actually Latin? The term “greeking” comes from the idiom “Greek to me,” meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.]
There are essentially two schools of thought on lorem ipsum:
1) People are easily distracted by content, so using lorem ipsum instead of real, meaningful content forces them to focus on layout and design.
2) Ban lorem ipsum! It’s lazy. By using lorem ipsum, aren’t you just procrastinating on creating real content? It can also be a symptom of a larger problem. If content is your most important asset, why are you retrofitting content to a design?
Here at Rock Creek, we’re working on a lorem ipsum compromise. We start every project with a content strategy plan, so by the time we develop wireframes or sketch out a brochure, we know what content is needed on each page. Wireframes, and then designs, are created to support the content, not the other way around.
When presenting to a client, however, if the focus is to get feedback on the design concept—typography, color palette, and so on—we tend to strip out the content and go with lorem ipsum. This helps the client focus on the feedback they need to provide at this stage of the project, instead of getting off track with content-specific feedback like “I don’t like the word ‘favorite,’ we should use the word ‘preferred’ here.”
Whether using meaningful content or placeholder text, we also find that clients appreciate a checklist of the feedback we need from them at this stage of this project. We want to talk about content. In fact, we love talking about content. Just not right now.
What do you think? Is placeholder text the enemy of meaningful content, or is there a time and place to use lorem ipsum?
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Comments
Jonathan Rick Nov 14, 2010
Natalya -
Way to make an age-old subject—should form follow function, or function follow form—timely and interesting! Here’s my two sense.
No doubt, content is king. While usability is critical, the guts of any site—the reason users return to it—are not how it looks, but what it says. (Exhibit A: The deliberately aesthetic-free Web Drudge Report. Exhibit B: Google.)
To be sure, design should never be an afterthought—<a >I myself cringe at ugly sites</a>. Rather, in development, design should emerge after the words have been crafted.
Jonathan Rick Nov 14, 2010
Natalya -
Way to make an age-old subject—should form follow function, or function follow form?—timely and interesting! Here’s my two sense.
No doubt, content is king. While usability is critical, the guts of any site—the reason users return to it—are not how it looks, but what it says. (Exhibit A: The deliberately aesthetic-free Web Drudge Report. Exhibit B: Google.)
To be sure, design should never be an afterthought—<a >I myself cringe at ugly sites</a>. Rather, in development, design should emerge after the words have been crafted.
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Dharma Nov 11, 2010
Great post Natalya! As a designer, it is quite easy to simply throw greeking copy into a design concept, but I agree that it gives you a very false sense of comfort, and often is a very incomplete or inaccurate gauge for what will be the true site content.
That being said, I think it can work when presenting design directions as long as there has been clear communications between the design and strategy departments, and designers have a very clear sense of what their greeking copy is designed to represent.