Designing a theme around a writer who doesn’t exist

The writer I had to invent

For a newsletter-focused Ghost theme I’m working on, I wrote an entire fake publication with a fake author.

Not just a couple of placeholder posts, but a backlog with short issues, longer essays, awkward titles, posts without images, and a few that were basically link dumps. The kind of mess a newsletter turns into after a year of showing up.

That fictional writer ended up driving more design decisions than the grid.

What lorem ipsum hides from you

If you design a Ghost theme in a vacuum, the flow usually looks like this:

• Sketch a layout
• Drop in lorem ipsum
• Use neat, 3-word titles
• Give every post a featured image

On that kind of content, almost any layout looks good. Columns line up. Cards feel balanced. Nothing wraps in a strange way. You can center things that only work because the text is short and polite.

The problem is that lorem ipsum is aggressively average. It never behaves like a real newsletter archive. It does not produce:

• One-line titles next to five-line titles
• Paragraphs that are two words too long for the neat grid you drew
• Empty states where a featured image “should” be
• Tag lists that wrap to three lines on mobile

So you end up designing for a fantasy publication. The theme looks clean in the demo and more fragile when someone actually uses it.

Building a fake newsletter that could be real

For this theme I wanted to see the opposite: what happens if the content is allowed to be ugly first.

I wrote the archive for a fictional solo writer with a newsletter habit. That meant:

• Posts that were basically “here’s a link and two paragraphs of commentary”
• Occasional longer essays with subtitles and section headings
• Several posts with no featured image at all
• Titles that looked like someone wrote them in a hurry

The goal wasn’t to be clever. It was to produce realistic lengths and realistic mistakes. I wanted posts that made the layout sweat.

Long, ugly titles vs tidy grids

The first casualty of real-ish content was the grid.

I wrote about this earlier in Content breakpoints for a single hero component.

In the early version, the archive was a set of cards in two or three columns, depending on screen size. With placeholder titles, this looked fine. Everything wrapped to two lines. Every card was the same height.

Once the fictional writer showed up, reality did too. Some titles were four or five lines tall. Others were a single short phrase. The cards turned into a skyline of different heights.

That forced a choice:

• Clamp the title to a fixed number of lines and hide the overflow
• Let the cards be different heights and accept the noise

Clamping looked better in a screenshot, but worse for someone trying to scan the archive. Important words disappeared. Several posts became hard to tell apart because they all started with the same truncated phrase.

So the layout shifted. The grid stopped doing all the work and the content took over the hierarchy:

• Fewer columns, more width per card
• Typography tuned so long titles stayed readable instead of overwhelming
• More space between cards so uneven heights felt intentional instead of broken

The archive moved away from a perfect grid toward a stack with rhythm. Less pretty in a Dribbble shot, closer to how people actually write.

Designing for missing featured images

The next problem was images. In the lorem ipsum version, every post had a high-res featured image. They aligned neatly and created a strong visual rhythm.

The fictional writer did not behave like that. Some posts had images, some didn’t, and some had screenshots that looked bad when cropped.

That broke the original card design. A layout that assumed “image on top, text below” turned into a patchwork of image blocks and empty placeholders.

The design had to adapt to the absence instead of pretending it would not happen:

• Cards that worked text-only, with the image as an optional accent instead of the foundation
• Thumbnail sizes that did not dominate the card when present
• Fallback treatments that did not scream “you forgot to upload something”

Once the layout looked fine with no images at all, the theme felt less fragile. A missing featured image became a style choice instead of a bug.

More on this in my article What My Automated Archive Exposed About My Writing.

What changed once the fake archive was in place

Excerpt length stopped being theoretical

With lorem ipsum, it is easy to say “show 3 lines of excerpt” and call it a day. With real-ish posts, some entries looked like they had no content at all, while others produced a wall of text.

Seeing that in context pushed the design toward a clearer pattern: either show a very short teaser, or show almost nothing and let the title do the work. The middle ground of “a bit of everything” fell apart fastest.

Meta information found its place

On fake content, you can tuck dates, tags and reading time anywhere and it will look fine. On the fictional newsletter, certain combinations felt noisy:

• Long titles plus long tag names plus a date line turned into clutter
• Short link posts did not need reading time at all

That pushed the meta into more deliberate positions. Some of it moved into secondary views. Some of it disappeared from the archive entirely and only lived on the post page.

The single post layout became simpler

Once there were longer essays and very short notes in the same system, the single post template had to handle both without feeling like overkill for one or cramped for the other.

The answer was restraint:

• Less emphasis on huge hero images
• More attention to line length and spacing for long reads
• Clear entry and exit points for short updates

The fictional writer pushed the template toward being boring in a good way. The content carried the interest; the layout stayed out of the way.

Why lorem ipsum makes themes look better than they are

After working with the fake archive for a while, going back to lorem ipsum felt like cheating.

Read also Lazy Loading Images Almost Tanked My Core Web Vitals.

Placeholder content is flattering. It hides edge cases, bad habits, and the laziness of real publishing. It lets decisions stay aesthetic instead of practical. It also gives a false sense of confidence that “this will be fine once there’s real content,” when the opposite is often true.

A Ghost theme that only looks good on lorem ipsum is like a car that only drives well on an empty, straight road. Technically impressive, practically fragile.

Designing around a writer who does not exist turned out to be a better test. The fictional author had all the annoying traits of a real one: inconsistent titles, skipped images, varying lengths, half-finished ideas. The theme had to survive that and still feel coherent.

The grid still mattered, but it was secondary. The real work was making peace with what posts look like once someone has been publishing for a while.

If a layout still holds up when a fake writer abuses it, there is a decent chance it can handle a real one.