If you’ve ever looked at a mock up, template or web design in its beta stages, you’ll notice unusual ‘nonsense text’ in lieu of words, this is known as Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum is simply the ‘dummy text’ in the printing and typesetting industry. It’s been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500’s when an unknown printer scrambled a galley of type when printing a specimen book.

The text has not only survived for over five centuries, but also has lasted the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularized in the 1960s and more recently with desktop publishing software. It is a well established fact that readers will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.

The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘insert content here’ on repear, making it look like readable English. This way any ‘faux-content’ makes the presentation more visually appealing.