Don't Lorem Ipsum Yourself To Failure

I recently received an email from a graphic designer, who had made a number of interesting concepts for the iPad. They looked good. But, he did the one thing that a designer must never do. He used test text and images as content.

The biggest mistake you can make when designing content is to turn to “lorem ipsum” - the Latin dummy text favored by a many graphics designers, as content filler.

It usually starts with a designer creating some kind of interface with a test image, a test headline, and some test text. And it looks good. Everything is placed nicely.

The design is approved, they start setting it up, and they end up with a terrible situation where the headline text doesn’t fit. The images are suddenly in a different format, and the description text is way too long.

Then they have a meeting, trying to figure out who is to blame, until they come to the conclusion that they are too far into the process to create a new design, so “let’s just see how we can make it fit”

The result is that the headline and body text are cropped, and a new workflow is introduced. Thus requiring people to manually create an image that fits the layout.

They just failed miserably (although most people do not realize that).

Never ever do that. Do this:

1. Create the content long before you create the design.
2. Define how concept should be presented before designing the interface.
3. Once your team is finished designing the interface, replace all the content with some other content to see what happens.