Anoushka Ferrari — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:37:50 GMT

The dummy data comes from the printing and typesetting industry, the language is not Greek but the technique described here is called ‘Greek or ‘Greeking. This is also commonly called ‘dummy text’, ‘lorem ipsum’ or ‘Greek’ or ‘greeked text’, even when text used is infact Latin.

Is greeeking useful in wireframes? Totally depends on the project, your team and the audience for the wireframe.

A stakeholder or a designer may be able to relate to it more when it’s real content, a stakeholder needs to understand the consequences of their decisions. But also for the person creating the wireframes, I find that even when you have done a full content audit and it all appears simple, working with real data while you are working on the wireframes highlights how the layout could work under the strain of real content.

However when you do wireframes that go to the development team greeking is pointless and realistic text is misleading, so best then to either annotate the Greek text or give them the attribute field in brackets (or content tags as mentioned above). How to annotate the wireframes? This then depends on the complexity and scale of the project. The top layer of the presentation of these attributes/content tags can be listed on the wireframe itself and then could reference the content object (metadata) model field which is often another document in itself.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Anoushka Ferrari