What are some accepted styles of Greeking for loading content?

Question

There's a technique that Facebook uses in their Timeline where it'll show fake "content" blocks while it's waiting for the real content to load. From a distance, it looks like the content has already loaded even though the only thing on the display is abstract shaded rectangles as Greeked text.

The only way I've seen this implemented is Facebook-style, where text is replaced with horizontal rectangles. This gives a particular look and feel to the page while it's loading. Are there other acceptable styles of Greeking and if so, what are they and where are they used?

Answer 1

Greeking is the generic term for showing fake text

Greeking is a way to emphasize form over details. (Greek symbols aren't required)

Lorem ipsum is probably the most familiar kind of greeked text. It allows looking at text formatting without actually having any content. Designers and developers often use lorem ipsum text to imitate real words with little risk of anyone getting hung up on fake/incorrect content because it's obviously fake and incorrect.

1. The infamous hamburger menu icon

The hamburger menu icon represents a list of content without actually being content. This qualifies as Greeking and is used by Google Inbox (among others)

2. Facebook shows text wrapping around an image using abstract Greeking

The most abstract form of Greeking is using shaded rectangles as symbols in place of where actual content will go. The main advantage of using rectangular Greeking is that it works regardless of alphabet. Pretty much the only localization that needs to occur is flipping the image so the rectangles read left to right for certain locales.

3. Video games often use abstract Greeking as well

To reiterate the fact that something is written on a page or sign in a video game, designers will showing something resembling text. This happens on some items in the game Minecraft.

Video game greeked text is probably a limitation due to pixel resolution but it also allows adding many signs in a town without having to generate real text content for each one.