(Roughly) Daily

When designers lay out a page, they need to fill the spaces that will ultimately be occupied with text with something that looks like the text that will ultimately be there– a field of letters, a filler, that allows the composer to assess the propriety of the font, it’s size and weight, and the like.  In the vernacular, this placeholder text is called “Greeking” (as in “it’s all Greek to me”); the most commonly used form is (ironically, because it’s actually Latin), Lorem Ipsum.

(source)

But while Lorem Ipsum does the job, it’s not very exciting…  So, the good folks at Bacon Ipsum have devised a way to add a bit of nitrite-laced spice to one’s mock-up and at the same time, to celebrate the emperor of meats.

One can go for text that’s both meat and filler:

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet ut chicken venison excepteur. Pork loin shoulder pariatur est voluptate fatback. Exercitation cillum dolore jowl minim, jerky corned beef fugiat labore ham tri-tip pastrami pork belly. Mollit flank bacon commodo. T-bone excepteur tri-tip nulla aute. Reprehenderit commodo nisi spare ribs ut. Mollit shank pancetta cow.

Or more adventurously, for the all-meat version…

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet headcheese ground round ham swine jowl spare ribs turkey ribeye, andouille short ribs. Pork headcheese ham biltong hamburger shankle bacon. Ribeye rump pig meatball hamburger beef swine. Turkey rump tongue pork loin. Hamburger ball tip corned beef shankle, pig pork fatback pork chop andouille strip steak bresaola biltong ham. Sausage pig strip steak fatback t-bone spare ribs, bacon hamburger jowl salami biltong ham hock. Meatball corned beef spare ribs tail.

Make your layouts luscious at Bacon Ipsum.

As we try to remove the grease stains from our mock-ups, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that Lucien B. Smith patented barbed wire (U.S. No. 66,182).  Eventually competitors produced more than 1,500 different types of barbed wire; but Smith’s patent gave him pride of invention.. His simple idea that was an artificial “thorn hedge” consisting of wire with short metal spikes twisted on by hand at regular intervals. For prairie farmers and cattlemen natural fencing materials were scarce, so the invention gave them an accessible way keep their cattle safely away from crops.  It also created tensions between farmers and ranchers: inexpensive barbed wire allowed farmers to fence in their fields, preventing ranchers’ livestock from feeding off of the farmers’ fields, and making it more difficult for cattle drives to cross farmers’ lands.   Ultimately ranchers too recognized the benefits of fencing their herds… and the days of the open range came to an end.

Copy of Lucien B. Smith’s wire fence improvement (barbed wire) Patent, 66,182, dated June 25, 1867 (source)