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Lorem Ipsum

DIY Lorem Ipsum. It’s a fun team-building exercise. Moreover, it’s good branding. As marketers, we’re always helping our clients to reinforce their brands in many ways. We also try to take our own advice now and again, and apply our methods to our own shops. Here is a mini case study about a cool marketing opportunity you can use. While working on a project, the team here at Inbox Communications got to thinking about Lorem Ipsum, the placeholder content that is part of the drafting stage of most of our creative work. 

What's with all the Latin-ish text?

Lorem Ipsum is generally dummy text used in laying out print, graphic design or website design. It is used because it appears as a natural looking block of text and  it doesn’t distract the viewer when reviewing the design elements of a layout.

For a long time it was considered to be Latin-looking gibberish. The words loosely approximate the rate at which letters appear in typical English so it looks quite realistic. However, now the passage is generally attributed to an unknown 15th century typesetter who is thought to have scrambled the text of Roman philosopher Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Extremes of Good and Evil.) He did so to mock up various fonts for a type specimen book. The passage begins as follows:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”

The passage experienced a surge of publicity in the 1960s after a French lettering firm, Letraset, used it in a variety of fonts, sizes and layouts on their dry-transfer sheets. These sheets of lettering could be rubbed on anywhere and quickly became popular with artists, graphic designers, architects and printers because of their ease-of-use and their professional appearance. There was another surge of publicity in the 1990s when Aldus Corporation (which later merged with Adobe) used it as dummy content for laying out page content in Aldus Pagemaker. A small company called Microsoft followed suit and the rest is history. Now Lorem Ipsum is ubiquitous as a placeholder in the digital landscape (and painfully sometimes in the final draft. Reminder: proofread and proofread again.)