There's a fashion, every few years, for designers to announce that Lorem ipsum is dead. Use real content, they say. Use your brand voice. Use anything but Latin. The pitch sounds correct — real content reveals problems dummy text hides. But I keep coming back to the 500-year-old workhorse, and I think the arguments against it misunderstand what it's for.

Placeholder text is not a stand-in for your content. It's a stand-in for any content. That distinction matters.

What Lorem ipsum is for

When I'm designing a news homepage, I'm not designing the 14 July headlines. I'm designing the template that those headlines will flow into for the next five years. I need to know that my type stack works at a wide range of lengths, that the grid holds up under different article mixes, that the hierarchy reads from six feet away. What I don't need is to be distracted by an actual story — because the story is going to change, and the template has to survive the change.

Lorem ipsum does something real content cannot: it flattens the semantic layer to zero. You stop reading and start seeing. You notice the colour of the page, the rhythm of the paragraphs, the awkward gap between the deck and the first line. If I drop in a Reuters story about Ukraine, my brain jumps straight to the content and I miss all of it.

"Dummy text lets readers see type, not content." — Lorem ipsum, forever

When to stop using it

There are three moments when Lorem ipsum becomes a liability. Learn them, and you'll know when to switch.

1. When the component is about language.

A button with the label "Lorem" tells you nothing. Does the button fit real-world button text? Is "Add to library" going to wrap? Will "Sepetim" (Turkish for "my basket") break the layout? Use real copy the moment a component's shape depends on what words go in it.

2. When you're testing the end of the funnel.

The closer a design gets to shipping, the more it needs to survive its worst case — not its average case. Real product names are weirder than Lorem ipsum. Real user reviews are shorter. Real error messages are terrifying. Swap in the real thing before you present to stakeholders.

3. When you're pitching the work.

Clients hate Lorem. They can't help reading it and feeling locked out. Even though your wireframes don't promise any particular content, clients will assume what they see is what they get. Always swap to plausible sample text before you share — even if you lose the abstractness that helped you design it.

A defence of the old warhorse

Lorem ipsum has a few qualities nothing else quite matches:

  • Right distribution of letter shapes. Real Latin has lots of ascenders, descenders, and round letters. Fake text written in English looks wrong — too many h's and e's, not enough tall letters. Type choices made against Lorem translate to real text.
  • Right average word length. 6.1 characters per word — within a rounding error of real English (5.1) and closer than any generated nonsense I've tested.
  • Culturally neutral. Nobody has an emotional reaction to the phrase "dolor sit amet." Nobody's tempted to read it. It does its one job and gets out of the way.

So yes, use real content at the end. But for the messy, generative middle of a project — when you're still figuring out the shape of the thing — Lorem ipsum is exactly the right wrong answer.