We’re Only Humaaans, After All; Lorem Ipsum Über Alles; Illustriously Lost And Found
The Drop veers into “design” land, on occasion, usually focusing on the principles and practice of how to craft and compose a given creation with deliberate thought and clarity. While there is certainly good reason to focus on theory, in practice we often need to rely on resources to help make our design concepts more concrete.
Today’s Drop title uses an ancient term with an embedded modern term to slyly note that we’ll be focusing on three sites with resources that can help you either bring your creations to life, or provide some assistance along the way as you build-out your workflows.
We’re Only Humaaans, After All
Adding human figures to apps, blogs, and other online content can help remove a cold/bland site feel and also enable you to connect better with those who are accessing what you’ve made.
Static images and illustrations are fine, but it’d be super cool if you could personalize illustrations of people in your designs, matching clothing, hairstyles, and poses to suit your the unique aesthetics of the context you’ve created.
Humaaans is a free illustration library from Pablo Stanley that can help you achieve just that. It’s a fairly unique platform which allows you to create custom scenes featuring a diverse range of human figures.
Customization options include:
👗 Top Clothes
👖 Bottom Clothes
💇🏽♀️ Hair Styles
☝🏽 Standing poses
🐒 Sitting poses
🖼 Background Scenes
🎨 Color palettes
While you can download them for free (there are templates for virtually every modern design software and “flat” assets in PNG and SVG formats), you may want to give it a go in Blush, a freemium online tool for designing and storytelling. As usual, this is just a gratis mention of the tool, and I mention it solely because you’ll see it referenced on the Humaaans resource page.
Lorem Ipsum Über Alles
(Looking back over the Drop’s history, I cannot believe I haven’t covered “ipsum” before.)
By now, most folks know about, have seen, or use “Lorem Ipsum”, the nigh ubiquitous placeholder text. It is a staple in the graphic, print, and publishing industries, and used extensively in previewing layouts and visual mockups. This enables designers to focus on the aesthetic elements without being “distracted” by the content. The seemingly Latin structure gives an authentic feel of real text, aiding in the visualization of the final product.
LoremIpsum.io provides a wealth of information on this venerable text. It starts with the origin: the roots of lorem ipsum can be traced back to a scrambled version of a text from Cicero’s “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”. Then shows how this niche text has survived through the origins in manual typesetting all the way to our modern digital age.
The site goes on to indicate why it might have become the de facto standard in said modern times, discusses the controversy — yes, this benign text has and continues to foster heated debate between design folks and textual composers.
While you will most certainly know more than you ever wanted after hitting that site, my main reason for including it today is for the plethora of generators it links to (it has one of its own on the main page).
Before you click away!
The site does not maintain the link references very well, so I’m including the linkified list of generators which do resolve to non-parked or non-spammy sites (please hit the loremipsum.io list for the explanations). I’ll also toss some of my own ipsum links towards the end.
Some of the ones that I like to use — either on-site or within text editors — include:
lipsum-cli (Rust CLI lorem ipsum generator)
lorem-nvim (Lua-backed vim plugin)
Illustriously Lost And Found
Nearly fifty Drops ago we covered the method and madness of “404 pages”.
TL;DR: you should have a solid 404 response strategy for your content-driven site and apps that provides helpful context to your consumers/audience, so they can actually find what they were looking for or accomplish the task they sought to complete.
While there is an absolute practical nature to these pages, they should also be aesthetically pleasing, so folks do not just click-away and abandon you to torment and death. One factor that helps make 404 pages engaging is the use of “clever” illustrations or images that will help keep folks engaged long enough to heed your hints on how to proceed. We covered some of these in the previous Drop, but this is the internet we’re talking about, so there are always more resources out there.
Error 404 provides royalty-free illustrations for 404 pages. The components of this collection all work from a similar illustration design style, which means you can mix them up to keep your 404 pages “fresh”.1.
Freepik has scads of freely licensed 404 illustrations. However, I suggest spending some time to try to find a few from the same designer to have the same flexibility that the aforementioned Error 404 offers.
And, believe it or not, Unsplash also has a category for 404 pages. More than a few choices, there, will even let you get all “meta” with some 404 “inception”.
I’ll limit this section to just those three offerings, since adding more items to the list could just lead to design choice paralysis.
Aside: If you look at your logs (you do at least look at a summary of your site logs, right?) you’ll likely see many bots causing 404’s on your site. These are (generally) either from malicious probes, or drunken crawlers. Perhaps take a page from Metasploit and serve up a “surprise” to the more nefarious ones?
FIN
Feel free to drop some of your fav ipsum sites/generators in the comments. ☮
which is an odd thing to consider, since we all likely try to avoid folks hitting 404 pages as much as possible
hrbrmstr's Daily Drop 
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