Feature
Post
Category
Webapps
Published Wednesday December 17, 2008 at 4:00 pm
By Thord Daniel Hedengren
Lorem Ipsum Sites Every Web Designer Should Bookmark
There are approximately 67,588 sites that offer the lorem ipsum phrase for your convenience. If you don’t know what it is, this is what Wikipedia will teach you:
In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is common placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. It is a form of “greeking”.
Even though using “lorem ipsum” often arouses curiosity due to its resemblance to classical Latin, it is not intended to have meaning. Where text is visible in a document, people tend to focus on the textual content rather than upon overall presentation, so publishers use lorem ipsum when displaying a typeface or design in order to direct the focus to presentation.
In other words, it is placeholder text to fill your designs with, that looks better than blah blah blah and won’t distract the viewer with any actual meaning.
So where can you get it? Well, google it and you’ll have a bunch of hits, and there are truly great web sites that offer the phrase for your convenience. I have a soft spot for Lorem Ipscream, flirting with ice cream and whatnot, but I wouldn’t say that it is a great choice for filler text, others are doing this better.
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has made a nice attempt with HTML-Ipsum. It is basically a collection of lorem ipsum snippets in various HTML tags, for your copy-paste convenience. This includes OL and UL lists, which is really handy, as well as some less funky stuff that still might be useful in some situations. But especially the lists, good call Chris! You can get them for Coda or Textmate as well, a nice feature.
However, my undisputed champion in this glorious battle is Per Bang’s Lorem Ipsum Generator. This most excellent site lets your choose how many paragraphs should be displayed, if they should be long, medium, short, mixed, and the same for the actual sentences. It can also do lists, and show everything in HTML source code as well as right there on your screen for copy-pasting. You really should give this one a go, it is by far the best one I’ve found.
What’s your lorem ipsum poison?
Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment
The authors of A List Apart’s latest issue would probably have a bone to pick with these sites:
“To those of us who work daily and intimately with words, the phrase ‘lorem ipsum’ sounds out a special kind of death.”
(via http://alistapart.com/articles/contenttiousstrategy )
Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment
I use Lipsum if I’m not on my Mac. If I am, I use the ‘Corporate Ipsum’ dashboard widget.
Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment
http://lipsumlet.com is a bookmarklet that automatically copies a paragraph of lipsum to your clipboard.
Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment
If you are using firefox, y recomend Dummy Lipsum
Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment
I like Chris Coyer’s approach. It saves me the time of writing markup.
I don’t know about you, but even when I use lorem ipsum text my client will *always* make some joke about it.