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 Ipsumtraces 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 but mean nothing. The first word, “Lorem,” is the tail end of “dolorem,” meaning pain or sorrow.
Lorem Ipsum solves a specific problem: Designers and typesetters often need to see how text will work in a layout before the real copy exists. Readable text is distracting. Gibberish that looks like text is not. Lorem Ipsum lets form take precedence over content—temporarily—so decisions about structure, hierarchy, and visual work can move forward.
Letraset popularized it in the 1960s through they’re dry-transfer sheets, and then carried into the digital age by Aldus PageMaker in the 1980s. Lorem Ipsum 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 Ipsumwould be fun to build and fun to use. Does it bring some unexpected delight to something that’s meant to be 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 (our jargon for those is “Mix-in”) 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 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 an industry and the placeholder text starts to look the part. It's still nonsense, but for a mockup, that's can be enough.
We also wanted to poke a little fun at the jargon problem itself—including in our own field. Building a tool that celebrates industry jargon in a context where it’s 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. As placeholder, 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.
We’re a team of makers. We design things, write things, develop things, photograph things. The process of building Jargon Ipsum—thinking through the Mix-ins, the industry categories, the interface, the tone—was reason enough to do it. It taught us things.
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. Building things is more important now than ever.
A sample of jargon ipsum.
About Jargon
We have strong opinions about jargon that 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 everyone doesn’t share 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.
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 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, we’d love to 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.
