The most important thing out of this whole issue is we should try and give priority to the content prior to starting the project.

I agree with some of the opposing comments from HN and this blog post, lipsum can be very useful under some circumstances

#James – This is something I would like to see as well.

However, by replacing Lipsum with readable content means that it will be harder to identify the sections of content that are not production ready before a site goes live. Which will probably lead to less than desirable content accidentally being left on pages for longer periods of time than some random Lipsum text would have been. Simply because the readable text will blend in more than the ugly greek.

Lastly, going over content changes before design or UI has even been discussed/agreed upon is ridiculous.

1. Stop making useless tool
2. You don’t understand Lorem Ipsum

You are just straight wrong. Btw, don’t spam YCombinator with crappy stuff.
And wth is kureno? What ever.

Dunno why it takes 5 minutes to say “It’s dummy text, used to help you focus on the stage we’re at in the design process – if it was real text, you might be more interested in correcting what it says than what it looks like. That comes in the next stage.” I’ve never needed any more explanation than that, if you don’t count occasionally having to give that explanation a couple of meetings in a row.

As for going straight to real text, sheesh, good luck trying to get through that mountain of ‘can-you-just’s that have popped up 5 minutes before the deadline… you know, all those design tweaks that they missed because they were playing with content.

I realise that there are pros and cons to both approaches, but take it from someone with a background in psychology – the client’s need for input/control will start with the lowest-hanging fruit that you offer, and how far it continues after that has been plucked is wildly variable. Text has a magical property – we read it and notice what it says even when we’re trying not to. We have an educational system that trains our children to do that, over anything else, for over 10 years of their lives. If you don’t use dummy text, it’ll be the content of that text that is the lowest-hanging fruit 9 times out of 10. If that’s their input for the time being, prepare for the deadline rush when their excitement is inevitably piqued again.

I chart every project I ever take, in order to constantly correct my workflow process. Part of that is charting deviations from the plan, their scale of interruption and where they occur. When I swapped to Lipsum, the difference was dramatic – instead of many peaks of interruption building in intensity as the deadline loomed, there was a nice, even spread of much fewer deviations.

Here’s a counter-anecdote in advance (psychology again ). I’ve had clients tell me that they hate the look or pallette of a mockup *as an afterthought* at the end of 3 or 4 paragraphs of text changes, on more occasions than I care to remember. Trying to elicit more details is harder too, because they want to see their changes happen before they invest more effort into thinking about more changes.

TL;DR: Started using Lipsum, deadline stress consistently halved. As always: If you doubt, test it out.