Lorem Ipsum Is a Content Choice

As part of my master's study program at FH JOANNEUM, we have workshops with guest lecturers from the industry. This time, we had the honor of learning from Arvid Brobeck, whose lecture "Content Is the Experience" raised a point that resonated with everyone in the room: content always comes last.

The problem

In most projects, the process runs strategy → architecture → visual design → development, and the real content arrives at the very end. By then, weeks of structural decisions have been made on the assumption that the words will simply fit into the design.

Here, Brobeck introduces the key idea: lorem ipsum is not the absence of a content decision; it is a content decision. Just the wrong one, made by default. When you lock a layout around placeholder text, you've already decided how long the copy will be and how much space the message gets. It is an unconscious choice.

My experience

I have faced this many times as a designer. I've built templates without real content, polished, approved, "finished" layouts full of lorem ipsum. Then the content arrived: headlines and text body copy twice as long as my placeholders, and didn't fit the layout. The finished work required additional rounds of adjustment and re-approval, resulting in lost time and money.

This is exactly the cost multiplier from the lecture: a copy change at the wireframe stage is the baseline (1×). After visual design approval, it costs around 4×. After the dev build, 7.5×. After launch, up to 12×. As he put it, "We'll sort the copy later" is the most expensive sentence in any content workflow.

Putting content first

What I appreciated most is that Brobeck didn't just diagnose the problem; he gave us practical tactics that require no special authority, things any of us can start doing immediately.

• Bring rough copy to the first review - before you're asked. A directional draft beats lorem ipsum every time.

• Replace placeholders quietly. If you have access to the shared file, swap "copy TBC" for real directional content before the review.

• Add content to the acceptance criteria. "No placeholder text in any shipped state" turns content into a ship/no-ship decision, unfinished copy blocks release the same way a bug would.

• Make the cost of late content visible with specifics. "A copy change after the dev build costs three dev days" wins rooms that "content matters" never will.

My takeaway

Coming from a design background and now studying content strategy, this lecture connected my two worlds. As a designer, I treated content as something that arrives later; as a content strategist, I now see that the words are the experience and that hierarchy, layout, and structure can't be designed around a decision nobody has made yet. The default is still a decision. Lorem ipsum is not neutral. Lorem ipsum is a content choice.