The ubiquitous placeholder text, ‘Lorem Ipsum,’ has an intriguing history dating back over 2000 years. It’s often used in design and publishing circles as a standard ‘dummy’ or ‘greeking’ text, where the focus is on visual design elements rather than actual content. To appreciate its fascinating journey, we must first travel back in time to the heart of Ancient Rome.
The roots of Lorem Ipsum are traced back to the classical Latin literature of Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman philosopher, in 45 B.C. The text originates from a passage in “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (On the Ends of Goods and Evils), a philosophical treatise on hedonism, virtue, and pain. Among the treatise’s dense Latin text, there’s a sentence that reads, “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…” This translates to, “Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself because it is pain…”.
Jumping ahead to the 1500s, a printer in an undisclosed print shop jumbled up Cicero’s text to create a type specimen book. The printer’s intent was to exhibit different fonts, not to present readable content. Consequently, he created a string of ‘nonsense’ Latin text, beginning with ‘Lorem Ipsum’ – an imperfect truncation of ‘dolorem ipsum’. This anonymous printer’s Lorem Ipsum has been the standard dummy text since then.
As the years rolled on, Lorem Ipsum quietly persisted in the world of typesetting, becoming more widely recognized with the advent of Letraset sheets in the 1960s. These sheets of transferable lettering could be rubbed onto a layout, including passages of Lorem Ipsum, bringing it into the mainstream.
Lorem Ipsum gained further traction in the 1980s with the dawn of desktop publishing. Aldus Corporation’s software, PageMaker, included versions of Lorem Ipsum, solidifying its role in the design world. With the rise of the World Wide Web, the usage of Lorem Ipsum exponentially grew, as web designers and developers adopted it for web page templates and content management systems.
Interestingly, despite being known as ‘dummy text’, Lorem Ipsum isn’t completely nonsensical. While it doesn’t have coherent sentences, many of its words are rooted in Latin, meaning that it somewhat mimics the frequency and structure of natural language, providing a realistic placeholder text.
The continued use of Lorem Ipsum in the digital age has been met with some controversy. Critics argue that it doesn’t accurately represent the visual impact of real-world languages, leading to less effective design outcomes. However, its defenders point out its neutrality and universality, asserting that it prevents premature content focus, thus ensuring a design-first approach.
From the scrolls of an ancient Roman philosopher to the bright screens of modern design software, Lorem Ipsum has stood the test of time. Its enduring appeal lies in its ability to provide an unobtrusive and neutral canvas on which designers can work, allowing form to take precedence over content, at least until the final draft. Despite its antiquity, as long as there’s a need for placeholder text, Lorem Ipsum will continue to fill our drafts, a quiet testament to the unending symbiosis of text and design.