A handy Lorem Ipsum generator and the story behind it

You’ve probably seen the passage that begins “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” around the web, or perhaps even used it in your own work. It’s a classic pseudo-Latin phrase that’s been in use for centuries as placeholder or dummy text for mocking up designs– newspapers, graphics, and more commonly today, websites.

Alex Dixon created a useful Lorem Ipsum generator and told us how he did it:

As a web designer myself, I’m constantly on the lookout for new and better tools for my design process. However, when it comes to placeholder text generators, most of them look as if they were created at about the same time as Lorem Ipsum itself (read: sometime in the middle ages). Always ready for a design challenge, I decided to build a better, and hopefully more engaging Lorem Ipsum text generator.

With such a long history, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to explore some serif fonts. Typography on the web trends heavily toward san-serif typefaces, so I thought it a great time to sharpen my skills. Dropping some vanilla JS parallax in the background gave the Roman era theme a slightly modern touch, all the while keeping the site lightweight. The whole project is built using the awesome static site generator Middleman, and hosted on Amazon S3 (with CloudFront as the CDN), which makes it lightening fast.

With the design and development out of the way, its time to get feedback and build out a few more sections like text editor / word processor plugins. But in the meantime if you’re in need of some placeholder text, or just want to learn more about the origins of the ubiquitous passage, try it out and let me know your thoughts: alex[at]wasai.co. Now, go get some Lorem Ipsum!