by Glenn Fleishman
It’s all Greeked to me
Emily Lin Zhang makes a real statement in the title of her new 30-minute documentary, “The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum“—that it’s unsolved! I’d argue strongly that her dogged research has largely filled in the missing pieces of the story of where the run of seemingly Latin text used by designers to act as placeholder (or “Greeked”) text in mock-ups since the late 1960s came from.
She meets in person with Richard McClintock, a publications director with a background in Latin, who first identified the text’s distorted origin in 1994. She also interviews and emails people who worked at Aldus and Letraset, buys a sheet of dry-transfer type on eBay, and pulls together a great story about graphic design, the classics, and history.
I found it riveting and hilarious, and exactly the kind of Rabbit Hole (her channel name) that I fall down with printing and type history myself.