No Lorem Ipsum In My Design

After college, I had a temporary job at a local web shop in Lancaster. My main responsibility was taking a Photoshop file from the designer and turned it into HTML using Dreamweaver. I remember slicing up the design and dropped it into the table. The text inside Photoshop looked funny to me, yet I didn’t even realize it was dummy text. I spent time carefully copied and pasted the text into HTML. I read every line, bolded and italicized a certain words just like the original design. After I did all of that, the designer told me it was just fill-up text.

Fooled me once and I hated Lorem Ipsum ever since. Whenever I look at a design with Lorem Ipsum I cringe. The text annoys me and gets very distracting. Since then I never used dummy text on my design. My policy is that I won’t start until I get some content from my clients. I need something to work with because I don’t want to waste my time with texts that don’t make any sense.

When I was asked to redesign something, I would take the contents from the current site to do my design. Without the contents, I can’t do anything. It’s a waste of time to create a blind design. I always ended up reworking the design simply because I have no idea what I was doing from the beginning.

Every time I start a new project, I always stress the important of contents before I start. If you hire me to do the job, you have to care enough about the project to do your part. When I was a still a student, I worked for a guy who had a dream of starting up an underground entertainment site. He didn’t have any content, but hired me to do the job. He sounded passionate about the project so I designed the layout for him. All that he needed to do was providing me the contents. He never did and the site never went live even though he paid for my work.

Six months or so ago, I also landed a contract, but I haven’t started on the project yet because the client never give me any contents. He did paid me the deposit, but I haven’t worked on the site. The guy sounds really nice when he writes me telling me he hasn’t forgotten about the site. He will provide me the contents soon. If this is going on for a long period of time, I’ll just give him the refund and call the whole thing off. We’ll see.

In any rate, this post was inspired by “Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs.” It is so true.