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Dummy Lipsum Generator. Go and get it. Why? You need to work fast, but communicate to your client your intended design specifications. And here, for specifications, I mean typography. You should read several books on Typography if you want to excel as a Web Designer, but here, we’ll just concentrate on how to use the Dummy Lipsum extension in a time saving way.

Dummying in your copy quickly saves “concepting” time — and also prevents distractions when someone (even you) reviews your layout.

The concept is simple — it’s a placeholder to communicate the design strategy: when you’re ready with the graphic portion of your website design, go ahead and insert “dummy” (meaningless) text into the layout using the font styling intended to work well with your design. Do this even if you have stories prepared and waiting for insertion. Huh? That’s right — do it even if you have stories/blog posts ready and available. Can you guess why? You are, at this stage, communicating (to a client) or simply considering for yourself the design concept for your site — not the editing details for stories.

You want the principles used to determine your choice for headings, body copy, captions, block quotes, pull quotes, decks, sidebars, and other typographic elements to be clear. Some of the names for those elements you should recognize from CSS coding. Other typography elements are concepts for typography you might learn in a good magazine editing course. What I see is a lot of BlogMasters, and Web Developers failing to recognize opportunities to make your messages sing, and your site a joy using well defined typographic concepts which may be translated from the world of print design to the web.

Here’s a site using the text from Dummy Lipsum to show a proposed redesign of a blog:



Above, Dummy Lipsum was used to quickly put in text for three reasons: to show text size and color; to relative length of copy (in green box, we want only approx. 35 words — Dummy Lipsum can generate a precise number of words for you); and to help the client to focus on layout instead of fussing over the wording. There’s an opportunity to consider that maybe a “serif” style typeface would be better for this blog.

Now let’s see the Dummmy Lipsum Generator in action. Like the concept behind it, the plugin is pretty straight forward with a couple of great options.



Note that there is a pop-down menu that lets you determine precisely what will get generated. I usually stick to “paragraphs” (if I am just roughly mocking up a design), or “words,” when I want be able to tell a copy writer exactly how long their story should be.

Once you choose how you want the Generator to make your dummy copy (checking HTML tags adds in code for paragraphs… another little time saver), you copy it to the clipboard. Then open your editing program, or even Photoshop and paste it into you layout.

The bottom line is that Dummying in your copy quickly saves “concepting” time — and also prevents distractions when someone (even you) reviews your layout.

The Open Source WebMaster Blog, written by Scott Frangos, is published as part of WebHelperMagazine.com — you may also find it at OpenSourceWebMaster.com.