Lorem ipsum makes things easy, and that is the trouble with it. It is always the perfect length. It never has an awkward client name in it, never runs three lines longer than the box, never carries the one legal sentence that must appear and cannot be cut. It lets a design look finished before the thinking has started.
I have watched projects come apart over this. The layout is approved, everyone is pleased, and then the real copy arrives and none of it fits. So the words get trimmed to serve the box, which is backwards. The box is meant to serve the words.
The hard part is not the drawing. It is asking a client to take their own writing seriously early, when it feels least urgent. Nobody wants to talk about words in the first week. Everybody wants to see a picture.
But the content is the design. The order of the sentences is the hierarchy. The length of a paragraph is the rhythm. What a business is actually trying to say decides the shape of the thing that says it, and without the message I am only decorating a guess.
So lately I have started asking for the words first, and holding off, gently, on drawing until I have them. It slows the beginning and it tends to save the end. That is a trade I am glad to make.