Is it Greek to you?

Toga Often times, when you receive concepts from an agency, you’ll see a headline and visual.  And in the place of the body copy — you’ll see what we refer to as Greek or Lorem Ipsum.

Typically, it will look a little something like:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem Ipsum is basically dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry that has been adopted by agencies as a basic placeholder. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

It has survived not only five centuries, but also evolved into all realms of electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.  It’s based on the theory that readers will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the source.

However, you can – thanks to the web, have you very own Lorem Ipsum generated.

Just a little fun fact for the day!

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8 comments on “Is it Greek to you?

  1. So what’s the translation?

  2. Something I learned about only a couple months ago, and a good factoid for the community.

  3. Designer Mike says:

    As a designer I use Lorem all the time. What I do when showing comps to clients is replace the first sentence with something about their company, then it leads into Lorem.

  4. TJ says:

    I use that occasionally. I like to use real copy, even if taken from a client’s previous site and if it is out of date vs. using Lorem all the time. But I have been known to goto lipsum.org.

  5. Andy,

    The translation is “bunny out” of course.

    Drew

  6. Mario,

    I agree. I’ve been around Greek for most of my career but I recently was introduced to the history of it and thought it was pretty interesting.

    Drew

  7. Mike,

    That’s an interesting approach. Does it throw them off when they start to read and then voila…it stopped making sense?

    Drew

  8. TJ,

    What’s your rationale for using real copy versus Greek?

    We’ve found that it allows the client to focus on the concept/design more when they can just “dismiss” the words.

    Sounds like your experience is just the opposite?

    Drew

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