Have you ever asked how the most commonly used Meme Font is called? I can give you the answer. The Font is called Impact. Impact is included in the Core fonts for the Web and has been distributed with Microsoft Windows since Windows 98, which means you should have the Font on board of your Operating System already. The very thick strokes of the Impact Font are aimed, as the name suggests, to “impact” and in other words to stand out. The Impact Font is commonly used for funny internet Memes like on the Lolcat Images.

So you should add a text with the Impact Font with your graphics software. The messages on memes are very often completely written in white capital letters and there is often a stroke effect or let me say a small black border added around the text. I can´t explain it for every graphics software but as I am a Photoshop User, I can at least tell you how it is done there…

First we should load our photo which we want to use with Photoshop to add a Meme Text. Most of you know how to add a text to the image but for those who don´t know it, it is easily done. We can either press “T” on our keyboard which would activate our Horizontal Type Tool and then we just have to click on our image to place the text or we just click on the Type Tool Symbol in Photoshop and click then on our image to place a text…

If we have done this, then we just need to choose the Impact Font and we should be sure that the text color is white. Also we can already change the font size. After we have done those settings, we start to type in our funny or not so funny text completely written in capitals if we want to do it on the common way…

But we now need this black border around the text like in all the other funny memes of the internet. We have to right-click on our new text layer and a menu pops up where we choose and click on “Blending Options…”.

In the opening Layer Style Window, we just activate and click on “Stroke”. This will paint the mentioned commonly used black borders around our text. I think it is always standard on black but we can proof this in the settings windows there. What we also could do is controlling the thickness of the border around the text.
I think it is standard on 3 pixels and for my taste not enough. I change the value sometimes to 5 pixels. But this is just a matter of taste. Once we did the settings here, we can press ok…

What we now still could do is moving our text. Just click on the text layer again and move the text until you feel it fits in the image. That is all. Hope this small guide is a help for those who want to create their own memes with Photoshop as well