When you were placing a text while you were designing something, you might’ve seen the words ‘Lorem Ipsum’ before. Have you ever wondered where the strange, yet familiar filler text, ‘Lorem Ipsum’ came from, and why designers started using it?
Lorem Ipsum is a placeholder text for demonstrating the text’s location. It originated from the latin words, ‘Dolorem Ipsum’, which is translated as ‘pain itself.’ These words were found in a passage from ‘De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum’, meaning ‘The Ends of Good and Evil.’ This passage was written by Cicero, who was a Roman author.
Then who started using this? According to lipsum.com, “Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.” And, Lorem Ipsum got introduced to the world of digital art in the 1980s by the Aldus Corporation which is a company that developed desktop publishing software.

Nowadays, Lorem Ipsum is used as a filler text for digital art like infographics, posters, and documents. This nonsense will continue to fulfill its role as the standard dummy text ensuring design is the center of the draft stage. Whenever we encounter this text, we can appreciate the behind-the-scenes process that makes final products polished in our daily lives.