Just say no to Latin

Lorem ipsum sucks. There, I’ve said it. I’ve come out against the designer’s fall back. Need a block of copy, none available from the client? Lorem ipsum will do. Need some sample user comments? Lorem ipsum. Need a headline to fill that space at top of the page? Want people to focus on the presentation and not the content? Whack in some latin. It’s the catch all filler copy, the designer’s best friend. Yet is lorem ipsum actually a friend to clients and, ultimately, a site’s users?

Our work at Made by Many falls into two distinct phases, strategy and production design. We don’t use lorem ipsum for either.

In the early phases of a project, we use design as a visual tool to help our clients understand the services we create. We often focus on a user’s key interactions, presented to the client as a series of highly polished screen designs. Whilst the visual nature of these designs helps translate our thinking into something that looks and feels real, it’s often the content that makes the service believable.

In fact, the service is only made real by showing the relationship between form, content and interaction. Taking away any one of those elements (by falling back on latin copy for example) immediately makes the idea less tangible.

As a project moves into production, there’s often the temptation to use latin as a design element – the idea has been signed off, what does it matter if the design becomes progressively less real? However, the most successful sites are those where the user has been considered at every step of the project. How do you do this? By creating designs that mirror the experience real users will have of the site as closely as possible.

Real users don’t see a site with latin headlines or where every comment is the same 50 word fake entry that has been repeated using cut and paste. By taking the time to use real copy, the designer is asked to consider each element from the user’s perspective. Does this form need any instructional copy? Is it as simple and as short as possible? Does the formating for comments work for both entries of 1 word and 100 words? What happens if a headline splits over 2 lines? Without considering these real elements, there’s a strong danger that design just becomes decoration.