Aren’t filler headlines fun to write?
They’re even more entertaining when you haven’t slept in 24 hours.
When I edited the student newspaper in college, my fellow editors and I would pull an all-nighter every Thursday to get the weekly edition “put to bed.”
We’d compete to see who could come up with the most hilarious fake headlines for the stories we were editing. After about 18 hours of work and several 22 oz. cups of Mountain Dew, we’d come up with some pretty epic stuff. Or at least it seemed that way …
One of my lamer efforts was: “Men’s basketball team not so good this year.” (I think I was still nursing my first Mountain Dew when I wrote that one.)
Unfortunately, our bleary copy editing eyes overlooked that one in the final proof read …
I learned what had happened when the assistant men’s basketball coach stormed into my office, slapped a pile of papers down on my desk and demanded to know why we printed that headline during recruiting weekend.
Yup, all of the promising high school players the basketball team was courting were on campus.
I learned my lesson from that: Don’t use clever “fake” headlines in mockups and designs, unless I like the idea of going toe-to-toe with red-faced men much larger than me …
At the time, I didn’t know about Lorem Ipsum text, the design industry’s standard for filling out a layout so you can see how it’ll look with text.
Using Lorem Ipsum rather than your own witty filler is A Very Good Idea.
And naturally Sublime comes with a snippet that makes it a snap to insert.
Just type lorem and hit the Tab key, and you’ll get a full paragraph of nonsensical (and non-embarrassing) filler:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
If you like the idea of not having to type filler but still want to retain the possibility of having to explain yourself, check out the HipsterIpsum plugin, which will allow you to insert more socially relevant text like this:
Food truck gluten-free banksy, fap occupy bespoke whatever mustache. Occupy kogi kale chips chillwave, odd future typewriter iphone twee truffaut viral ethical artisan put a bird on it single-origin coffee banh mi. Master cleanse brunch occupy trust fund marfa yr.
If you’d like to Occupy Sublime as your odd future typewriter, I have just the thing to help you with your master cleanse: