Placeholder Text Considered Harmful (and When to Use It Anyway)

There's a debate in design that never quite gets resolved: should you use lorem ipsum or real content when building a layout? I've been on both sides. After years of building UIs, my position is that placeholder text is a tool with a specific purpose, and the problems arise when you use it beyond that purpose. Let me explain both sides, and then we'll talk about how to use placeholder text effectively. The case against lorem ipsum The argument is straightforward: lorem ipsum hides content problems. When a designer fills a card component with three lines of perfectly balanced Latin, it looks great. Then real content shows up: a product title that wraps to four lines, a description that's two sentences longer than expected, a user's name that contains 47 characters because it's Thai. Content shapes design. A heading that works in English might not work in German, where compound words make everything 30% longer. A card layout that looks clean with 50-word descriptions falls apart when mar