About the author
Richard Ingram
I’m a writer, information designer, and content strategy advocate hailing from the sleepy English seaside town of Hastings. After a brief stint as a computer games journalist for Barrysworld and GAME over a decade ago, I’ve since become one of a triumvirate of brothers at Ingserv, co-founder of Kinship, and co-organiser of the London Content Strategy Meetup.
You can email me at hello {at} richardingram.co.uk and find me on Twitter, Linkedin and, if you must, Facebook.
Hey. What’s the deal with Cicero? Hardly a modern poster boy, is he?
It’s all to do with lorem ipsum, the Latin-ish passage, which is often inserted as filler copy for our web page mock-ups. It was intended to show how the type will look before the copy is available.
It appears that lorem ipsum formed part of the Cicero’s passages, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics, written in 45 BC.
The original reads:
Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit… (“There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…”)
So it’s thanks to Cicero, and the early adopters of lorem ipsum, that content strategists have an easy way of explaining the benefits of our discipline before people’s eyes glaze over.