Let's talk about a very specific and a very common moment in the creative process. You're a designer, and you are presenting a brand-new, and a very beautiful, website mockup to a client. The layout is perfect, the colors are stunning, and the font choices are elegant. But the final, written content for the website isn't ready yet. So, where all of the final text will eventually go, you have placed a block of what looks, to the untrained eye, like some kind of strange and scholarly Latin. It all starts with the famous words, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."
Your client looks at it, and they get a slightly confused look on their face. They ask you, "This all looks fantastic, but what is this strange language? I don't speak Latin!"
If you are a designer or a developer, you have almost certainly had this exact conversation. That strange and that seemingly nonsensical text is, of course, Lorem Ipsum. It is the universal, the undisputed, and the incredibly useful, dummy placeholder text of the entire, global design industry. It is a grand and a noble tradition that goes back for centuries. But where do you actually get this magical, nonsensical text when you need to be able to fill a space in one of your new designs? Well, you don't have to just copy and paste the same, old paragraph over and over again. You use a simple online tool to generate as much of it as you need, in just a few seconds.
Before we get into the easy, modern way of generating this text, let's just take a moment to appreciate the absolutely fascinating and the surprisingly deep history of Lorem Ipsum. The first thing you need to know is that it is not actually random gibberish. And it's not really "fake Latin" either. It is, in fact, a scrambled and a jumbled-up version of a real passage from a classical, Latin text that was written way, way back in 45 BC.
The original text comes from a treatise on the theory of ethics that was written by the famous Roman orator and philosopher, Cicero. The story goes that, sometime in the 1500s, a European printer took a galley of type from Cicero's text and he scrambled it up to be able to create a specimen book. This was a book that was designed to be able to showcase all of his different and beautiful fonts and typefaces. He needed some text to be able to show off his fonts, but he didn't want the text to have any distracting meaning. And so, Lorem Ipsum was born. And for the last 500 years, it has been the undisputed and the accepted standard for placeholder text in the printing, the typesetting, and now, the digital design industries.
So, this brings us to a very important and a very logical question. If you just need some text to be able to fill a space in your design, why do we go to all the trouble of using this strange, pseudo-Latin gibberish? Why not just copy and paste a few, real paragraphs of English text, like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"?
The answer to this comes down to a very powerful and a very important principle of human psychology. If you use a piece of real, readable, and comprehensible content as your placeholder text, the people who are looking at your design whether it's your client, your boss, or your colleague will inevitably start reading it. They will get distracted by the meaning of the words, and they will completely stop paying attention to the thing that you actually want them to be looking at, which is the design itself. Your client will start to make comments about the text, instead of giving you their feedback on your beautiful layout.
Lorem Ipsum brilliantly solves this problem. Because it is not real, readable Latin, it doesn't have any distracting meaning. But it also has a very natural-looking distribution of its letters and its word lengths, which very closely resembles the look of real, English text. This gives you a very realistic impression of how a final block of text is going to look in your design, without the distraction of a readable message. It’s like using a mannequin to be able to display a beautiful dress in a shop window. The mannequin has a human shape, but it has a blank and an expressionless face. This is a deliberate choice. It allows the customer to be able to focus all of their attention on the dress that's your design and not on the face of the mannequin that's your content.
This simple but incredibly powerful need for a good, high-quality, and non-distracting placeholder text is an absolutely essential and an everyday requirement in a huge and a diverse variety of different, creative fields.
The most common use case, of course, is in web design mockups. A web designer, maybe one right here at a busy agency in Colombo, is building a brand-new website layout for a local hotel. They will use Lorem Ipsum to be able to fill in all of the text blocks on the page the headings, the paragraphs, the testimonials long before the final, professional marketing copy is ready. This allows the client to be able to approve the final design and the layout of the site, completely separately from the approval of the final text.
It is also used constantly in graphic design, for the creation of brochures, of flyers, of posters, and of magazine layouts. It is also an essential tool for software and for app development. A UI/UX designer will use it to be able to fill in all of the user interface elements, like the text boxes, the user profiles, and the message streams, to be able to see how the final user interface is going to look when it is full of real-world data. And finally, it is an essential tool for font testing. Typographers and designers will use Lorem Ipsum as the standard, default block of text to be able to see how a brand-new font looks and feels in a real, paragraph format.
So, for years, what was the traditional and the manual way of getting this magical, placeholder text? Well, for a very long time, there was basically one, single, famous and universally recognized paragraph of Lorem Ipsum that was passed around the internet like an ancient and a sacred scroll.
You would have to go to a website that had this text, you would have to copy it, and then you would have to paste it into your design, over, and over, and over again, until you had filled up the space that you needed to fill. Now, the problems with this method are pretty obvious. The first is that it creates very obvious and very ugly, repeating patterns in your design, which can look very amateurish. And the other big problem is that it is incredibly inflexible. What happens if you only need two, short sentences of text? Or what if you need ten, full paragraphs? The manual, copy-and-paste method is just not a very good solution.
This pressing need for a flexible, for a fast, and for a non-repetitive way to be able to get the absolute, perfect amount of placeholder text for any given situation is exactly why every single, modern designer and developer now uses a Lorem Ipsum Generator.
This type of tool is a simple but incredibly useful utility that has been designed to be able to generate unique and randomized paragraphs of this pseudo-Latin text, in any length that you could ever possibly need. The workflow is an absolute dream. You just go to the website. You will see a few, simple options. You can specify exactly how many paragraphs, how many sentences, or even how many words of Lorem Ipsum you want to generate. You click the "Generate" button, and in an instant, the tool will give you a perfectly sized and a unique block of placeholder text that is ready for you to use. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of powerful and incredibly user-friendly tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can get the perfect placeholder text for any design project that you are working on, in a split second.
As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best ones are designed to be both incredibly easy to use and surprisingly flexible. They are built to be your reliable and your on-demand source of perfect, placeholder text. A really top-notch online tool for generating your Lorem Ipsum should have a few key features. It should include:
A tool with these features is an essential part of any modern designer's toolkit.
Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple tool user into a smart and a strategic creator. The Lorem Ipsum text is a placeholder. It is a brilliant and a time-tested, temporary stand-in for your final content.
But a beautiful design is absolutely nothing without the real, the valuable, and the human-written content that will eventually have to fill that container. The generator is an absolutely crucial and an invaluable tool in the design process. But you, the writer, the creator, and the designer, are still the one who is responsible for creating the final, the meaningful, and the persuasive content that will actually be the thing that communicates with your audience. So please, don't ever forget to go back and to replace all of your beautiful, dummy text with your even more beautiful, real text!
Let’s be honest, you do not want your important, client design presentations to get sidetracked by a long and a distracting conversation about the placeholder text that you have used. It is time to embrace a 500-year-old and a time-honored tradition, and to supercharge it with the power of modern technology.
By using a simple online tool to generate all of your Lorem Ipsum, you can create beautiful and effective mockups that will allow your design to be able to truly speak for itself. It is the professional, the smart, and the time-tested way to be able to focus all of the attention on the form, long before you have perfected the final function.