Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

One of the funniest design review comments I've seen came one time from a person who sent an email critique asking "are we really going to translate all these pages into Latin?"

Of course, the reviewer was referring to the "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." placeholder text that is a staple of design mockups.  This Latin stream of text is typically used to fill text blocks in design comps, the theory being that when people are reviewing designs, repeated Latin text will be less distracting than English.  Sometimes, people mix in other languages, like the Spanish in the above example, but a full block of Latinesque lorem ipsum text typically goes something like:

The practice of using this filler text is so pervasive that many tools offer options to generate it automatically for you.

So, what does it mean? Though I took three years of Latin in school, I could never quite decipher the meaning. It turns out that's because (1) I've forgotten all the Latin I learned and (2) anyhow, the initial sentence phrase is composed of scrambled fragments from old Roman literature (Cicero's "The Extremes of Good and Evil" written in 45 BC) so it doesn't really mean anything ('lorem' is actually a word fragment of 'dolorem', for instance, and there are words missing from the actual Cicero quote).

Not surprisingly, there are a couple of web sites devoted to Lorem Ipsum, including Lorem Ipsum All the Facts, and overview of the history of panagrams and a Lorem Ipsum generator site that can also create filler text for morse code and other languages and character sets.

43: The Cloud Room: Sunlight Reprise

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