Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…

Look familiar? As designers we all use it in our mockups, and it’s a common placeholder text in the fields of design and publishing. It’s not intended to have meaning, rather to just typically show font and typography style (the words also approximate a typical distribution of spaces).

Finally, after using this for years, and never knowing the origin, I decided to browse the web and see if I could find out some history about it. Well, I didn’t have to look far - the first site I went to, Wikipedia, had a lot of interesting info:

- The text is derived from Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil ).

- The original passage began: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit

- Translation of original passage: “Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it.”

- Full translation of original version: Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

- Today’s popular version of lorem ipsum was first created for Aldus Corporation’s first desktop publishing program Aldus PageMaker in the mid-1980s for the Apple Macintosh. Art director Laura Perry adapted older forms of the lorem text from typography samples. The text was frequently used in PageMaker templates.