February 19, 2000

5:00 PM

If you're tired of using canned Latin "Lorem Ipsum Dolor" to fill the text areas in your design projects, how about using 21st Century Greeking instead. It features such meaningful passages as: "Fundamentally transforming well designed actionable information whose semantic content is virtually null. To more fully clarify the current exchange, a few aggregate issues will require addressing to facilitate this distributed communication venue."
posted by mathowie (3 comments total)

Unfortunately, English text doesn't work that well because one of the more important reasons for using Latin text is to make sure the client is focused on the design, not on the text. I've greeked in English before and the client always ends up in la-la land, reading away, even if it's gibberish. The Latin works great because it looks like actual words, but people can't read it (unless they know Latin, which is getting more and more unlikely these days).
posted by jkottke at 5:39 PM on February 19, 2000

Actually that greeking stuff looks like a language to me....Corporatese. I'd say showing this stuff to corporate clients would be a bad thing - they'd probably re write their copy for you because it "gave them new ideas they'd like to convey" or something stupid.
I can think of a former client of mine that'd do that.
posted by tomcosgrave at 5:52 PM on February 19, 2000

That makes sense (Jason), but it was funny enough that I grabbed it anyway. My recollection was that "Lorem Ipsum Dolor..." was gibberish latin, but in trying to confirm that, I found this link indicating that it was a slightly jumbled passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, and that it's been in use for copyfitting since the 1500s... I may have read something about how long it's been in use (in Stop Counting Sheep, maybe?), but that was still cool info... Now I want to pull the original Cicero to use - non jumbled.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 7:23 PM on February 19, 2000