Placeholder Text Is a Surprisingly Useful Tool

Placeholder Text Is a Surprisingly Useful Tool

I love journaling on my scrapbook pages. In my pages, I try to link stories to photos. I also make pages without photos just to capture a special memory for my family. So why do I sometimes add placeholder text on my pages instead of real journaling?

Reasons to Use Placeholder Text

There are two reasons I like to use placeholder text.

First, I will use random text when I don’t want to share my journaling publicly. If my actual journaling has a lot of identifying details or is very person to me, I will use random text on the version that I share in public scrapbooking galleries.

The second reason I use placeholder text is during the page creation process, to help me add text as a design element on my scrapbook pages. When I am trying to find balance on a page, I like to visualize how the journaling is going to fit into the design. If I’m not ready to write the journaling yet, I’ll use placeholder text so that I can test different fonts, text sizes, line spacing, et cetera.

Lorem Ipsum

Perhaps the most common placeholder text is called Lorem Ipsum. This is a piece of scrambled latin text that has been in use for many years. This is what I use as placeholder text on my pages.

Lorem Ipsum has words and sentences in a variety of lengths. This is important in design because it approximates actual writing. Take a look at the example text below, with one side showing a repeated sample sentence and the other side showing Lorem Ipsum. Both paragraphs are in the same font, weight, line spacing, and paragraph alignment. But, the Lorem Ipsum text more closely resembles what the actual paragraph will look like once real journaling is placed there.

For a long time, I’ve kept a copy of Lorem Ipsum in a text file on my desktop. Then, whenever I need text to work with in a design, I just copy Lorem Ipsum and place it in my Photoshop document.

I recently learned that Photoshop can do this automatically! With the text tool active and using either a line or text box, select Type>Paste Lorem Ipsum from the menu.

Paste lorem ipsum

With the Lorem Ipsum text in place, it is easy to play with the font, font size, line spacing, et cetera.

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