The Library · 36 pieces
A field guide to
placeholder craft.
Essays, histories, and practical guides on lorem ipsum, typography, and the small decisions that separate competent design from beautiful design.
Pillar
Practical Guides
5 pieces
5 min
CSS Lorem Ipsum: Placeholder Text Without JavaScript
Using ::before { content: '' } for placeholder text, why it harms screen readers, when it is acceptable, and the better alternative with aria-hidden.
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6 min
How to Generate Lorem Ipsum in Figma, Sketch & Adobe XD
Figma's Content Reel plugin, Lorem Ipsum plugins, Sketch's Data feature, XD's repeat grid — keyboard shortcuts and workflows for placeholder text in every major design tool.
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6 min
Lorem Ipsum for Developers: A Format Cheatsheet
Lorem ipsum in plain text, HTML paragraphs and lists, Markdown, JSON arrays, JSX with escaping, and XML — copy-ready snippets for every developer format.
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5 min
Lorem Ipsum in VS Code: The Emmet `lorem` Shortcut
Everything about Emmet's lorem shortcut: lorem, lorem10, lorem*5, p>lorem, ul>li*5>lorem3 — with the full abbreviation reference for placeholder text in VS Code.
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6 min
Placeholder Images to Pair with Your Placeholder Text
picsum.photos, placehold.co, Unsplash Source, dicebear avatars — URL parameter syntax for each, and when to use blurred real images versus solid placeholder shapes.
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Pillar
Reference
4 pieces
10 min
All Lorem Ipsum Variations: The Complete List
An annotated index of every notable lorem ipsum variant — with sample text, origin year, and best use case for each. The canonical reference for placeholder text variations.
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8 min
Free Fonts for Lorem Ipsum Mockups (Curated)
Curated Google Fonts grouped by use: serif body, serif display, sans body, sans display, and mono — with a one-line case for why each typeface belongs on this list.
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8 min
Lorem Forge Generator: Feature Reference
Complete reference for every Lorem Forge generator option — flavors, units, HTML wrapping, seedable PRNG, export formats, and the developer API.
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12 min
Typography Glossary: 100 Terms Every Designer Should Know
A–Z definitions of 100 typographic terms: aperture to x-height, baseline to zero-width space. One-sentence definitions, precisely stated.
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Pillar
Essays & Opinion
4 pieces
7 min
A Brief History of Placeholder Text in Software
From Aldus PageMaker 1.0 (1985) through QuarkXPress, InDesign, Sketch, and Figma to AI-generated placeholder copy — the complete software history of dummy text.
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7 min
Famous Lorem Ipsum Mistakes in Production
Documented cases of lorem ipsum shipping to production — newspaper layouts, app screenshots, government websites. The cautionary tale and the QA lesson it teaches.
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6 min
Greeking, Dummy Text & Placeholder: A Glossary
Define greeking, dummy text, placeholder, FPO (for position only), and lipsum — with etymology and precise distinctions between overlapping terms.
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8 min
The Lorem Ipsum Controversy: Should We Stop Using It?
Jeffrey Zeldman's content-first argument, the 2010s backlash from A List Apart and Karen McGrane, the rebuttal, and a nuanced position on lorem ipsum's proper place.
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Pillar
Flavor Library
6 pieces
3 min
Bacon Ipsum: A Meaty History
Created by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn in 2011, Bacon Ipsum and its full meat lexicon. Why food brands love it and how it became one of the most-imitated ipsum variants.
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5 min
Beyond Lorem: A Tour of Themed Ipsum Generators
Cupcake Ipsum, Hodor Ipsum, Samuel L. Ipsum (NSFW), Zombie Ipsum, Skate Ipsum, Office Ipsum, Cat Ipsum — brief verdicts on the most notable themed placeholder text generators.
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4 min
Cicero Ipsum: The Authentic Latin Original
Why some designers prefer the unscrambled De Finibus passage. The authentic text, its uses in literary and academic mockups, and how it differs from standard lorem ipsum.
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3 min
Corporate Ipsum: Synergize Your Mockups
The buzzword generator aesthetic — leveraging synergies to circle back on actionable insights — and why Corporate Ipsum is surprisingly useful for B2B enterprise mockups.
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4 min
Hipster Ipsum: Artisanal Placeholder Text
The origin of Hipster Ipsum (hipsum.co, ~2012), its vocabulary of kale and fixies and cold-pressed everything, when it works, and when it actively grates.
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3 min
Pirate Ipsum: Avast, Ye Designer
Arrr, shiver me timbers — the niche but memorable pirate ipsum variant, its vocabulary, and the specific design contexts where it earns its place.
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Pillar
Typography Fundamentals
9 pieces
8 min
Choosing a Typeface: A Practical Framework
Mood, medium, language coverage, weight range, and licensing — a structured framework for typeface selection that works for screen, print, branding, and UI.
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9 min
Font Size, Scale & Modular Type Systems
Modular scales from minor second to golden ratio, fluid type with clamp(), defining a full type scale with CSS custom properties — practical implementation guide.
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8 min
Hierarchy: Guiding the Eye Through a Page
The five tools of typographic hierarchy — size, weight, color, space, position — how they work alone and together, and the squint test for evaluating any composition.
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7 min
Kerning, Tracking & Letter-Spacing Demystified
Kerning is pair-specific; tracking is uniform. When to tighten display type, when to open up all-caps, and how CSS letter-spacing actually behaves in practice.
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8 min
Mastering Line Length, Leading & Measure
The 45–75 character measure, leading sweet spots, CSS max-width and line-height recommendations, and why Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style is still the benchmark.
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10 min
OpenType Features You Should Be Using
Ligatures, small caps, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, stylistic sets — the full CSS font-feature-settings and font-variant-* cookbook with real code examples.
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7 min
The Anatomy of a Typeface
Serif, sans, slab, display, mono, script — and the parts that make them up: terminals, ascenders, x-heights, counters, bowls, apertures, stress. A visual vocabulary for designers.
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8 min
The Rules of Type Pairing
Contrast vs. harmony, hierarchy logic, the safe-pair recipes that work every time, and what to actively avoid when combining typefaces.
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7 min
Widows, Orphans & Rivers: Microtypography
Define widows, orphans, and rivers. Modern CSS fixes: text-wrap: balance for headings, text-wrap: pretty for paragraphs, hanging-punctuation, non-breaking spaces.
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Pillar
Design Theory
3 pieces
7 min
Color & Contrast for Readable Text
WCAG 2.2 contrast ratios, why pure black on white creates harshness, near-black recipes, and the specific pitfalls of dark mode contrast inversion.
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7 min
Designing for Reading vs. Scanning
Long-form vs. scannable design: different rules for measure, leading, hierarchy depth, and paragraph length for editorial reading versus landing pages and dashboards.
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7 min
Whitespace Is Not Empty
Macro vs. micro whitespace, the 8pt spacing grid, and the density-versus-clarity tradeoffs illustrated by Bloomberg Terminal vs. Apple.com.
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