Why We Built Jargon Ipsum
If you’ve spent any time in design, development, or publishing, you know Lorem Ipsum. That block of scrambled Latin-looking text that shows up in mockups, templates, and “insert content here” placeholders. It’s so familiar most people stop seeing it.
Which is exactly the point.
A Brief History of Useful Nonsense
Lorem Ipsum traces its roots to Cicero—specifically to a scrambled, nearly unrecognizable passage from his De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, or “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” Someone, at some point, took that text and garbled it just enough to make it look like Latin without meaning anything. The first word, “Lorem,” is the tail end of “dolorem,” meaning pain or sorrow.
It became the standard filler for layout work because it solves a specific problem: Designers and typographers often need to see how text will look and flow in a layout before the real copy exists. Readable text is distracting. Gibberish that looks like text is not. Lorem Ipsum lets the form take precedence over the content—temporarily—so decisions about structure, hierarchy, and visual weight can move forward.
It was popularized in the 1960s through Letraset’s dry-transfer sheets, and carried into the digital age by Aldus PageMaker in the 1980s. It has survived essentially unchanged for decades. Not bad for butchered Cicero.
Why Build Another One?
Because we wanted to. And we could.
We thought Jargon Ipsum would be fun to build and fun to use. We were right on both counts. Does it bring some unexpected delight to something that’s normally unremarkable? We hope so. There’s a difference between a tool you reach for and a tool you tolerate—we wanted Jargon Ipsum to be the former.
Jargon Ipsum
We also wanted to refresh our skills building something for the web from scratch. No CMS, no framework—just an idea. Projects like this give the team room to test new approaches from start to finish.
We leaned into making it expandable. The backend is sophisticated enough to make adding new word banks straightforward. And we will be adding them—revisit toward the end of the year.
If you’re wondering whether it’s practical: It’s at least as useful as traditional Lorem Ipsum. When you’re mocking up a design presentation, a healthcare brochure, or a real estate website, a wall of vaguely Latin text doesn’t quite look like it belongs. Jargon Ipsum closes that gap. Pick your industry and the placeholder text starts to look the part. It doesn’t sound like the industry—it’s still nonsense—but it looks a bit more like it. For a mockup, that’s often enough.
We also wanted to poke fun at the jargon problem itself—including in our own field. Building a tool that celebrates industry jargon in a context where it’s completely harmless felt like the right kind of self-awareness. To be clear, we’ve been part of the problem: Design and communications aren’t innocent when it comes to specialized language that can exclude more than it explains. But here, jargon can run free without doing any damage.
What About AI?
AI can generate anything right now—including placeholder text, industry-specific or otherwise. Why build something by hand when a prompt could do the same job in seconds?
Because we wanted to build something. That distinction matters to us.
We’re a team of makers. We design things, write things, develop things, photograph things. The process of building Jargon Ipsum—thinking through the word banks, the industry categories, the interface, the tone—was reason enough to do it. It taught us things. It gave us something to point to that reflects how we think, not just what we can produce.
There’s something to be said for a tool that does one thing deliberately, rather than everything approximately. Jargon Ipsum is specific. It was built with intention and a point of view. That’s not a knock on AI—we use it, and we think carefully about how. But building things is more important now than ever.
A sample of jargon ipsum.
About Jargon
We’d be remiss not to acknowledge the irony directly: We built a jargon generator, and we have strong opinions about jargon.
Those two things aren’t in conflict. We’ve written about this at length—but the short version is that jargon can be a useful shorthand. The problem is using it without explanation in rooms where not everyone shares the same vocabulary. That’s when it stops being efficient and starts being exclusionary.
Jargon Ipsum lives in the one context where that problem doesn’t apply. Placeholder text isn’t meant to communicate anything to anyone. It’s a stand-in, a visual approximation, a temporary occupant. In that context, the more jargon the better—it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is look like the thing it’s standing in for.
What We Hope You Do With It
Use it. Have a laugh. Share it. Let it make your next mockup feel just a little more like the real thing.
When the placeholder has to go—when the mockup becomes a website, the deck becomes a presentation, the template becomes a document people actually need to understand—that’s when you need the real thing. That’s the work we do.
If you’re at that stage, or you can see it coming, let’s chat.
We make it easy to copy and paste—or try again.
One More Thing
Jargon Ipsum includes an “Everything Ipsum” option—a mix of every industry word bank we built, for when you want your placeholder text to be maximally, gloriously incoherent. Check it out.
