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.
The Lorem Ipsum Controversy: Should We Stop Using It?
The Backlash
In the early 2010s, a wave of content strategy thinking swept through the web design community and landed, with some force, on lorem ipsum. The argument, advanced by practitioners including Jeffrey Zeldman, Karen McGrane, and writers at A List Apart, went roughly like this: lorem ipsum is a crutch that allows designers to defer the hard work of content strategy, produce layouts that cannot survive real content, and obtain client sign-off on designs that will require expensive rework when real copy arrives.
The argument was made with heat. "Get rid of lorem ipsum" became a rallying cry for a generation of content-first practitioners who had watched, in real projects, the consequences of layouting against dummy text: truncated headlines, overflowing navigation labels, footer columns that break when translated to German, UI copy that was never actually written because everyone assumed the layout-approved design "took care of it."
These were real problems. The critique landed because it identified genuinely bad practices and gave them a visible symbol to attack.
The Case Against Lorem Ipsum
The strongest version of the anti-lorem-ipsum argument is not that lorem ipsum is inherently harmful — it is that lorem ipsum enables a set of practices that are harmful:
It decouples layout from content. A layout developed against lorem ipsum makes assumptions about content length, structure, and density that may be entirely wrong. When real content arrives, the layout must be renegotiated — often under time pressure, late in the project, with less flexibility than earlier iterations would have allowed.
It delays content strategy. If designers can fill their layouts with dummy text, the pressure to develop real content diminishes. Content work gets pushed downstream until it becomes the critical path item that delays launch.
It enables false client approval. A client who approves a lorem ipsum layout has approved the visual design, not the product. When the two diverge — when the headline they want is twelve words and the design accommodates four — the client's expectation of the approved design conflicts with what is actually achievable.
It is inaccessible in research contexts. UX research participants cannot give meaningful feedback about content clarity, comprehension, or task completion when interacting with lorem ipsum prototypes.
The Rebuttal
The anti-lorem-ipsum critique, taken to its logical conclusion, implies that no design work can or should be done without real content. This is practically untenable and theoretically confused.
Design and content are genuinely separable concerns in many contexts. Template design — the architecture of a content management system's component library — requires design decisions to be made before any specific content exists, because the template must accommodate hundreds of future content instances, none of which exist at design time. The argument that these decisions require real content is circular: which real content? Whose? From which future article?
The critique also conflates lorem ipsum as a tool with the misuse of lorem ipsum as an excuse. A framework requiring real copy for all design decisions would not improve design practice — it would transfer the content problem to design team, or paralyze iteration.
More fundamentally: the problems the content-first argument describes — late-stage rework, failed client sign-off, content strategy neglect — are organizational and process problems, not typographic ones. A team with poor content strategy will have poor outcomes with or without lorem ipsum. A team with strong content strategy uses lorem ipsum appropriately, for structural and typographic decisions, and transitions to real content at the right stages.
Where the Nuance Lives
The honest position is that the content-first critique was correct about overuse and misuse of lorem ipsum, but overreached in positioning lorem ipsum itself as the problem. The proper conclusion is not "stop using lorem ipsum" but "use lorem ipsum for what it is good for and switch to real content when the work requires it."
Lorem ipsum remains the right tool for:
- Typeface evaluation and selection (see Choosing a Typeface: A Practical Framework)
- Template and component library design
- Early-stage layout exploration
- Type specimen work
It is the wrong tool for:
- Client approval presentations of final-direction layouts
- UX research and usability testing
- Accessibility audits
- SEO strategy mockups
- Any context where content quality is itself under review
(The full decision framework lives in Lorem Ipsum vs. Real Content: When to Use Which.)
The Generator's Position
A lorem ipsum generator that knows what it is — a tool for visual and typographic decision-making, not a substitute for content strategy — is not part of the problem the content-first movement identified. The problem was designers who used lorem ipsum as permission not to think about content. The solution is designers who understand when lorem ipsum serves the work and when it doesn't.
That understanding is what this site tries to build. The generator is useful; the knowledge of when to use it matters more.
Key Takeaways
- The content-first critique of lorem ipsum identified real organizational problems but overstated lorem ipsum as the cause
- The strongest critique is that lorem ipsum enables harmful practices: deferred content strategy, false client approval, inaccessible research prototypes
- The rebuttal: design and content are genuinely separable in template and component work; the problems are organizational, not typographic
- The honest position: use lorem ipsum for structural and typographic decisions; switch to real content for research, audits, sign-off, and SEO
- The issue is not the tool but the discipline of knowing when to stop using it