Many web designers, myself included will tend to use the familiar Lorem ipsum text for a placeholder.  In fact I don’t know many designers who don’t use this text when they’re submitting draft designs to  their clients.  But often it doesn’t really look quite right in many designs for a variety of reasons.

Firstly there’s an awful lot of text in that script, in an earlier phase of the design process it can be a little overwhelming.  Your subtle backgrounds or delicate side scrolls can be lost in barrage of unintelligible text.  Even on sites that will contain lots of text, having something that you can’t read (unless your lucky enough to have a latin education), is often quite confusing when you’re trying to appreciate a site.

Well there’s now an alternative and one I think people will actually rather like.  The new font in question is called BLOKK and it’s a very simple font that is just made up of dashes.  For designers it’s a great resource as you can use it for many stages of the design process including replacing the latin text we’re all familiar with.

There are some other fonts with similar purposes, try checking out a designer called Christian Naths who has produced some interesting variants on this theme.  Some of these sites only offer for sale to American clients due to licensing issues however if you use this technique to get an American IP address – http://www.proxyusa.com/usvpn then you can bypass this restriction.  You don’t need it on all the sites but it’s a useful technique to be aware of.