Testing layouts the way content will actually stress them
A layout that looks perfect with uniform placeholder text often breaks with production content. Generate deliberately uneven samples: one card with a 4-word title next to one with a 12-word title, a paragraph followed by a single sentence, a list where one item wraps to three lines. Grid alignment, line-clamp truncation, and flexbox stretching bugs only reveal themselves under variance — and finding them at design time is far cheaper than after the CMS fills with real entries.
Plan for translation expansion
If the interface will be localized, English mockups understate the space you need: German and Finnish run roughly 30–40% longer than English on average, and short UI labels can double (“Save” → “Speichern”). A practical heuristic while designing with placeholder text: confirm every button, tab, and navigation label survives at +40% length without truncating or wrapping awkwardly. Padding generated text slightly beyond the expected English length is a cheap insurance policy.
When placeholder text is the wrong tool
Content-first design flips the workflow: write the real (or realistic) copy before designing around it. This matters most for landing pages and marketing sites, where the message is the product and the design exists to serve specific sentences. Use Lorem Ipsum for structural surfaces — admin tables, feeds, card grids — where content is user-generated and unknowable; use drafted real copy for the five sentences on your homepage that actually have to persuade someone.
A brief origin note
The passage traces to Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (45 BC), scrambled into nonsense by a 16th-century typesetter and revived by Letraset transfer sheets in the 1960s and Aldus PageMaker in the 1980s. Its longevity is practical, not sentimental: five centuries of typesetters have agreed that it looks like language without reading as one.