mood board

Writing for Mental Floss, Miss Cellania introduces us to some clever alternatives to the boilerplate, filler text “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” Sort of like the classic Kant-Generator, my favourite of the bunch is the Samuel L Ipsum. Unlike the other engines, however, that return gibberish based on a certain genre, the sample text that is delivered are actual blocks of dialogue spoken by the characters Mister Jackson has portrayed:

Do you see any Teletubbies in here?  Do you see a slender plastic tag clipped to my shirt with my name printed on it?  Do you see a little Asian child with a blank expression on his face sitting outside on a mechanical helicopter that shakes when you put quarters in it?  No?  Well, that's what you see at a toy store. And you must think you're in a toy store, because you're here shopping for an infant named Jeb.

And unlike the greeking that’s characterised the lorem ipsum (since it’s not even sensible Latin), one runs the risk of having readers focus on what the text says, rather than how the text-layout and type-speciment looks in the presentation.