The Death of Lorem Ipsum

by July 26, 2024

For years, designers have used Lorem Ipsum text as a placeholder in interface design layouts. But unless you're designing a pseudo-Latin text reader, using actual content provides a much more realistic picture of what a UI design needs to support. Today Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide designers with highly relevant content instantly so Lorem Ipsum can finally die.

It's long been argued (well at least by me in 2019) that using Lorem Ipsum text to mock up application interfaces fails to represent real content, often leading to usability issues and unrealistic designs that don't account for actual text lengths, line breaks, or content hierarchy in a final product. But Lorem Ipsum persisted as a design tool of choice because getting real content was hard.

To get very realistic content, designers would need access to where real content existed or pester engineers or domain experts to collect realistic content for them. It's not hard to see why some of these requests took a while or never got prioritized. And while some teams took the time to build tooling that enabled more realistic content in the design process, Lorem Ipsum was a much easier path for most.

Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) can not only generate sample content but also create highly specific and relevant content for just about any application you're designing. And given these tools are fast, widely available and free, there's no excuse to not use very realistic content in application designs. For example, if designing a food delivery app. A few prompts will give you real content, real quick.

Claude provides real copy, no need for Lorem Ipsum

So there's no excuses for Lorem Ipsum no more.