How Lorem Ipsum Makes Web Projects Fail

In a lot of web projects the content is likely to change much more frequently than the design. The design will be done by a freelance designer once and be reused for several years, possibly on multiple sites.

The content is often written by the business owner or as a side job for someone who works for the business full time and as such gets updated every week via a CMS.

I've seen plenty of web projects where the client has supplied the initial content and the design has been built around that. Come back in a few months and everything is a mess because new content has been shoehorned into places where it doesn't really work.

In such cases the best one can hope for is a generic template style design that doesn't break when someone copy-pastes 300 characters into a space designed for 100.

Meh.

Sometimes you do just need to dump crap into the thing to see what it looks like, and Lorem Ipsum is better than banging on the keyboard for a few paragraphs.

I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy anyway -- you can do both, use filler text and viable copy when it's available. But if, say, you're making a forum or have a client who isn't exactly eager to dump copy on you, or they want to write it themselves, or you just want to tweak around on some css, anything is better than nothing.

Using some actual content while developing the product helps a lot reviewing the outcoming product, thus also aiding the design.

But 'Death to Lorem Ipsum' and '10 ways Lorem Ipsum will kill your web project' seems to me rather exaggerated.

I get more irritated that they can take an elegant and memorable phrase like "dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit" (pain itself, because it may be pain) and butcher it.

Edit: downvoted?! Doesn't anyone on HN appreciate the classics? :-)

This post is definitely light on details but the idea of content first in design simply the idea that a site is not all about look and feel, but about what it is going to be used for. Knowing the content, or at least the subject matter of the future content is pretty important to the design, branding, UX and so on. I don't think it's about anything more than that.

Terrible, bullshit, linkbait article. And I say that as someone who has been managing Web content for well over a decade.

> Content people really hate Lorem Ipsum. It says to us: ‘The words don’t matter very much. Just fill in this space with any old stuff. No one cares.’

No, it says that you, the content person, have not yet provided the real content to the designer. Designers have deadlines and can't/won't/shouldn't wait for content.

It also says that the designer knows that you, the content person, have a nasty habit of changing content or creating new content over time, and the design will need to accomodate that.

Content-free blogspam.