“As a designer, you have your baby that you want to try and sell. To make it saleable, you might pick someone who has really nice photos in their profile and use that to make your mockups,” Felton says. “But you’re ultimately just lying to yourself and the rest of the group if you think everyone’s page is going to look like that.”
In what is a lovely article, Felton describes something that I have myself learnt over the years. It is the simple fact that when you are creating mockups, you can either choose to have the best of the photos to adorn content and make your design saleable, be that to a client or team members, BUT you know deep down that it would not be looking this awesome once you create some not -so-awesome content in those placeholders. Sadly that will be the case more often that not. So why fool yourself by using the best images and content for placeholders.
A corollary to this is that it is always the best to design for edge cases than designing for the average cases. If your design can adapt itself to the extremes the averages will of course fit in just right.
