Posts Tagged ‘greeking’
It’s kind of like a Sofia Coppola film…
Reader’s may remember Bacon Ipsum, the down-home alternative to Lorem Ipsum, used by designers for “greeking” in placeholder text.
Well, now there’s a cooler, more moderne choice: Hipster Ipsum: “Artisanal filler text for your site or project.” A sample…
Jean shorts butcher thundercats, sartorial raw denim brunch messenger bag fanny pack. Vinyl banksy mixtape etsy. Shoreditch mcsweeney’s high life messenger bag, synth raw denim Austin tumblr art party etsy thundercats retro next level carles lomo. Food truck tumblr carles, fixie high life chambray trust fund whatever. Wes anderson wayfarers put a bird on it Austin aesthetic, iphone mixtape vegan. Mlkshk irony high life, single-origin coffee portland raw denim fap. Viral next level cliche fanny pack, letterpress irony high life wayfarers seitan carles.
Head on over to Hispster Ipsum for the coolest of layouts…
As we affect a posture of amused indifference, we might wish a symbolically-logical Happy Birthday to mathematician Guiseppe Peano; he was born on this date in 1858. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much of the symbolic notation still in use.
Blah, blah, blah…
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)
It’s all Greeking to me…
Web page layout, employing Lorem Ipsum
Studies show that people asked to assess a page design will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. So designers and editors use “Greeking”– non-English text that has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using “Content here, content here,” making it look like readable English.
But while the name is surely an allusions to the old saying “it’s all Greek to me,” the actual text usually employed is in fact Latin; more specifically, it’s “Lorem ipsum”:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum malesuada aliquet tortor vitae mollis. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nulla justo neque, luctus a laoreet quis, auctor et libero. Aenean elementum consequat nisi id ullamcorper. Quisque quis bibendum sem. Nulla id dui tellus, a semper sapien. Mauris est eros, dapibus ut luctus ac, ultricies sed enim. Praesent molestie cursus neque at faucibus. Vestibulum non nisl ac mauris ultricies porttitor eu eget leo. Aliquam porttitor scelerisque arcu eu tempus. Pellentesque faucibus consectetur magna, non consequat erat molestie at. Praesent nisl mi, congue ac semper at, iaculis non felis. Curabitur laoreet mattis augue, id hendrerit lacus hendrerit quis.
While to those of us with rusty Latin it might appear random, it is in fact closely derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC, a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, is excerpted from a line in section 1.10.32.
While no one is quite sure who first chose it nor why, it’s been in regular use since the 16th Century.
One can generate one’s own passage (of essentially any length) here.
As we fire up Pagemaker, we might recall that it was on this date in 1884 America’s first roller coaster– or “switchback railroad,” as then it was known– began operating at Coney Island. (The “hot dog” had been invented, also at Coney Island, in 1867, and was thus available to trouble the stomachs of the very first coaster riders.)
source: Ultimate Roller Coaster
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