Web Designs
Why designers should ditch Lorem Ipsum and learn to write
Throughout your career, you’ll spend countless hours honing new skills that can help you be a more intelligent or versatile designer. You may turn your photography hobby into a side hustle, spend your free time on Skillshare learning a new program, or pick up Jessica Hische’s excellent book In Progress because you want to get better at custom lettering.
You may even spend so much time talking about design or the skills you’ve picked up that you start sharing what you’ve learned with others here on Medium.
There are tons of bonus skills to chase, all valuable to designers in different ways. But we rarely talk about writing as a design skill.
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself
- John Smith
In our day-to-day, we laboriously push pixels, carefully choose and place visual elements, or obsess over the steps and dependencies of a process to provide a user with a better experience. And we do these things with a passion because we love them.
I think it’s really important we learn to do the same with words.
As the people at 37 Signals wrote in their eBook Getting Real: “If you think every pixel, every icon, every typeface matters, then you also need to believe every letter matters.”
Content and design go hand-in-hand
Excellent writing ensures that content is informative and easy to understand. In the same way good content leads to clear messages in print communications, it has the same crucial impact on effortless user experiences. Words should be just as carefully chosen as a color palette.
Ignoring copy in the early design stages only delays the focus on solving
a problem, hoping that someone else will worry about it later.
For a long time, using the placeholder text Lorem Ipsum (also known as “dummy text”) has been a widely accepted solution for designers looking to make early progress on a design while waiting for copy. We’ve all had someone suggest “just grab some Lorem Ipsum” at one time or another when we needed to fill out a layout template or test typeface combinations.
But how often did those decisions turn into something useful? More likely, you had to adjust your layouts or font choices once you received that copy.
Let’s be honest: Using filler text is a lazy practice.
Relying on the approach treats valuable context as an afterthought rather than an equally-important element in an overall design strategy. Every text passage represents your brand voice, or allows someone to use your product successfully, or helps someone make sense of important data. Whatever role copy plays — no matter how small — it’s always important.
While placeholder text may seem an easy solution, using it can do more harm than good. Even if you h
The real value of Lorem Ipsum
Regardless of all the origin stories you can find online, Lorem Ipsum is nothing more than nonsensical Latin text. It became famous as a time-saver method to help us imagine the complete visual form of an in-progress design. It’s the antithesis of meaningful content: It has no substance, no message, no value beyond being slightly better than a blank page.
Its existence is problematic because visuals and words go hand-in-hand to create valuable design solutions. Isolating content from design — at any phase of the process — can result in a disconnected strategy, misunderstanding of intent, and poor communication of an intended design solution. Even worse, that placeholder Lorem Ipsum could go live, leading to embarrassing situations for brands (or for you).
As a practice, it’s inefficient for communicating about design solutions because it only leads to unrealistic interpretations. How are you supposed to collaborate with your teammates or clients using gibberish? When building a design solution, you not only have to focus on the visual form and organization of the content or the message that content communicates, but you’ve also got to think about the people who need to interpret your design work.
People are drawn to text. If you put words in front of someone, they will read them. If that content is nonsense, they’re going to be confused. Not just about the words, but the intended audience for the design solution and its role in solving a problem for them.