How to Make a Meme: Impact, Captions, and Export Sizes
Why memes use white Impact with a black outline, how thick that outline needs to be, and what size to export for each platform.
The first meme I made took twenty minutes in Photoshop and still looked off. White text, black outline, right font. But the outline was hairline thin, the caption floated too far from the bottom edge, and the whole thing read like a screenshot of somebody’s mistake. The classic look has rules. Most of them trace back to a typeface older than the web.
Why memes use Impact
Geoffrey Lee drew Impact in 1965 for Stephenson Blake, a type foundry in Sheffield. It spent three decades as an ordinary display face for posters and headlines. Then Microsoft folded it into the Core fonts for the Web package in 1996, which put it on essentially every Windows machine and made it free to download for everyone else.
That accident of distribution is the whole story. By the time image macros took off on early forums, Impact was the one heavy condensed font nearly every reader already had installed. Nobody picked it for its aesthetics.
The catch now: Impact ships with neither iOS nor Android. A meme built in a phone browser falls back to whatever condensed face happens to be there, which is why the Meme Generator offers Arial Black and Verdana alongside Impact instead of pretending the first choice always lands.
The outline does the real work
White text on a photo is unreadable maybe half the time. Sky, snow, a pale shirt, a blown-out window, all of it swallows white letters.
The black stroke fixes that, but only when it’s thick enough. A one-pixel outline on a 1200-pixel-wide image vanishes the moment Instagram recompresses it. The rule worth stealing: outline width around one twelfth of the cap height. On 90px letters that works out to roughly 7px of stroke. Draw the stroke first and the fill on top, otherwise the outline eats into the letterforms and the thin joins close up into blobs.
Short captions win
Two lines. Maybe three. Past that the font has to shrink, and a shrunk caption is a caption nobody reads at thumbnail size in a feed.
If your top line needs a subordinate clause, cut it. Setup on top, punchline on the bottom, and the image carries the connection between them. That’s the entire grammar of the format and it hasn’t moved since 2008.
What size to export
Most source photos are fine as they are. Anything past about 2000px on the long side just makes a heavier file for no visible gain once the platform gets hold of it. Rough targets:
- Instagram feed: 1080×1080 square, or 1080×1350 portrait
- X in-stream image: 1600×900
- Telegram and WhatsApp: anything sensible, both recompress hard
- Reddit: original resolution, it’s the gentlest of the four
Export PNG if you can. JPEG at 80% quality leaves visible mush around a black outline, which is precisely where the eye notices it.
Nothing leaves your browser
The photo is decoded with the Canvas API and drawn locally. No upload step means no server copy sitting somewhere, and there’s no watermark stamped into the corner of your download. Close the tab and the file is gone from the page.
Drop a picture into the Meme Generator, type a line on top and a line on the bottom, and grab the PNG.