Lorem Whoopsum

A while back, we employed a new design agency to create some simple webpage designs. Anyone familiar with this kind of work will be used to seeing faux-Latin “Lorem Ipsum” text used as placeholder text, which usually looks something like this:

Text: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi in leo eget enim imperdiet lacinia…” 

And so on.

The idea is that because it’s meaningless text, you don’t get distracted by reading it when looking at the design. However, the designs we received were instead filled with the following text:

Design Text: “Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book…”

After being a bit baffled for a few minutes by this unorthodox choice, we Googled some of the text and realised what must have happened. Someone at the agency had obviously been instructed to “fill out the layout with text from [Website]” and literally did just that, with apparently no one checking their work before it was sent to us. They’d even copied the paragraph that explained why you don’t use readable text for page layouts!

We didn’t use that agency again.