Howdy!
My name is Denis, and here at KitchenCoders, I work as an art director. My blog posts will be mainly about design - both the specific tasks we do on projects and the industry in general. On some technical points I will be helped by Evgeny and Egor, who, by the way, also write a lot of interesting things, check it out.
Well, I want to start with a fairly well-known but no less interesting and important topic, namely, what to do with content when developing the concept of layouts from scratch. Here we go!
Fish is for lazybones
Evgeny, developer
Lingva latina non penis canina ** Latin isn't bullshit to you.
Evgeny is right, of course, but perhaps not in this particular case. Lorem ipsum is a classic meaningless "fish" filler inserted into the page layout. Lorem Ipsum is a distorted excerpt from Cicero's philosophical treatise "About the limits of good and evil", written in Latin in 45 BC.
Why should I bother
It's simple - to improve the visual perception of the content grid. Very often, at the beginning of work, the designer is faced with a situation "draw something I don't know what" - there is no content, no intelligible information from the client, and the layout of something to collect. The easiest way - everywhere to use the "text text text text" - although I have not seen any customer who would accept something like this. The same words merge into porridge, distract attention from the grid and just indicate the laziness of the designer. But Lorem ipsum eliminates these problems - the text is not readable from afar, but gives the impression of the presence of content.
Do I really need it?
Personally, I don't use Lorem ipsum, preferring to think about "fish" from beginning to end. It takes a lot more time, but there are a number of reasons for that:
- Allows a better understanding of the customer's area of work. To fill in the section "Articles" on the layout of the construction company, I climb the sites of other construction companies, read the news there, learn something new about the activities of our client.
- Increases the chances of adopting the layout/reducing the modifications. Layout with a completely invented fish looks like an absolutely ready-made site, and very often an impressed client is ready to accept everything with minimal corrections.
- Gives a chance to avoid many changes to the layout, if at the stage of "fish" check almost all the tricky points (about them below).
Egor - developer
On the contrary, I will use Lorem ipsum quite often - during layout, integration of partition management modules, etc. Content there will change after all, but there is no sense in wasting time and twitching the designer.
Of course, Egor is right here - "fish" is not always needed if the time and money spent on its development is too much, or makes no sense at all - dare to use Lorem ipsum.
The tricky moments (as promised)
During 10 years of work I have drawn sonneys of "fish" models, which allowed me to highlight a few simple rules that, if followed, will greatly facilitate the life of both the designer and his team:
- Do not create a grid "under the ruler." Yeah, I know how cool 4 news per line looks, with exactly 3 lines of description under each of them. In fact, there will be 4-5 and maybe even 10 - depends on who will write the news. If you think everything through in advance - avoid finding out with both the customer and the maker.
- Use the longest data you can think of. It's cool when Ivanov Ivanov hangs in the "Manager" block. And tomorrow, Constantinople will get a job in this firm and that's it, the grid's over. Make a list of the longest - position, address, name, product name of the client - it will help you a lot.
- Use "fish" to promote your ideas and expand your functionality. You can offer the customer to slip a beautiful banner on the site with his products and he will say "no" - because it is not very representative. Show the same on the layout and maybe there is a chance to persuade him.
I guess that's it! I am always happy to answer all questions in the comment below! Next time in our mini section "Azy" I'll try to tell you about the basics of content formatting - forged-"herringbone", long dash, why you can't use it (Egor, hello!) - that's it!