type design is my burden: an exploration of meme typography
The title of this article is a reference to a now-famous meme commonly referred to as graphic design is my passion. The design of the meme is minimal, but the point is clear. You can almost hear the sarcasm in your head, based on visual delivery alone. There are several graphic design crimes on display. The white background on the clip art, the random color choices, the questionably legible type, the jpg artifacting, and the use of papyrus are all deliberate, meant to evoke a certain kind of naive, bad on accident graphic design.
There are dozens of examples of this meme being reinterpreted, with some commonalities — gradients, bad type choices, and clip art. There’s a whole blog devoted to tracking these variations. One thing in particular about this meme’s spread piqued my interest; how elements of this meme have taken on a life of their own. With your newfound knowledge of this meme, take a look at these two edits of album covers.
Contextualized by the original meme, this is a critique of the design delivered in a way that makes anyone who knows the original hear it in their heads. You don’t need to see the whole meme to recognize the point. That’s the power of memetic spread. A whole section of my generation will always associate these elements — regardless of context — with sarcasm.
Not even a year later, someone reinvented graphic design is my passion and created this.
While graphic design is my passion sarcastically sends up bad designers, graphic design is my burden is its complement, expressing the feeling of tragically knowing enough about graphic design to notice bad design. This iteration uses a different frog instead of the original frog clipart, the emotion reflecting the despair of the statement. It’s evocative. What designer hasn’t felt this way! Simply typing the words out wouldn’t have this effect, either — the whole image builds a new meaning, one that refers to the original meme as well.
I will digress for just a moment to show one variation on this meme in particular. Some of you may remember the public outcry at this design of CGI Sonic the Hedgehog, for the Sonic movie that came out early this year. Well, one reaction took the format of a meme. from this you can infer not only how the poster felt about Sonic, but also in a more meta sense, who they feel is to blame. There are levels of meaning associated with using this particular meme format — and it works without them, but so much context is added in knowing.
Type is a major part most modern memes, and has been from the beginning. In the early days, when image macros like I Can Haz Cheezburger and Philosoraptor were popular, the typeface was chosen for readability alone. Most used Impact, a system font and condensed sans serif that, by nature of its black outline, was highly legible over any image. Image macros were easy enough for anyone to use, which contributed to their popularity. And now, with smart phones and free photo editing software and apps, meme makers get to be a little more creative.
Many people much more knowledgeable than I are working on documenting and classifying memes. Knowyourmeme, the site I mentioned earlier, does a pretty good job — the Library of Congress is actually archiving the site as part of its files. So today, I want to focus. We’re going to talk about specifically the purpose type serves in memes. And I see three main categories.
Lets break these down.
The first category is in many ways the most fun. When I was pulling examples, it was the group I filled out the quickest. This is also probably the group that you’ve seen heading up articles about the so-called “millennial sense of humor”, which I would argue is more generally related to internet humor rather than being constrained to a generation.
The type is used as an aesthetic element, almost more the idea of a meme than a true meme. A reaction image, one might say. They lean hard into absurdism. References exist, but are minimal or so insular they might as well not exist for most viewers. And look at the typographic variety. Sometimes I see a meme, and my initial reaction is truly, how did they make this? Like the meme below:
The second category is broad, but also pretty simple. Memes where the language and design is ironic. There are some interesting trends here. People like to use Microsoft Wordart styles. The words are often a bummer. The visuals, purposefully outdated. There’s a layer of intentional disconnect between the two, and in discussing this I want to quote internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch.
She describes irony as a “linguistic trust fall”. Irony is complicated to convey through text because it’s hard to communicate period. It requires a level of unsaid, understood connection. And so, as she recognizes, it also “creates space for sincerity. If you and I can have the same web of complex attitudes towards one thing, she posits, then maybe we can also share more straightforward attitudes towards others.”
In using sarcasm online, meme creators aren’t just being sarcastic, they’re signaling their membership to a group. A group that shares this sense of humor, and a sense of aesthetic. This is a group that knows more about graphic design than any other before them. And how could they not?? We live in a world where in a given day, someone using the internet will see more graphic design than previous generations could even dream.
Paired with increasingly dire circumstances in the world at large — a rise of political extremism, a rise in diagnosed mental illness, and the climate crisis to name just a few factors— and it’s no wonder that online people have responded by creating increasingly elaborate memes. After all, as McCulloch observes, irony makes room for sincerity. The sarcastic nature of the graphics provides plausible deniability, distance from the vulnerability expressed in the words. It’s a feature, not a bug, that understanding memes requires in-group knowledge. If someone doesn’t get it, then they don’t deserve to know how you feel.
The third group is the referential group. There are the straightforward ones, screenshots of shows or reinterpretations of other jokes. Often, the meaning takes on new forms compared to its original context. And on rare occasions, that understood meaning is stored in the text of the meme in ways that can be recombined with others.
I’ve only found a couple of examples of this. It’s phenomenon I haven’t seen in other graphic design outside of the strongest logo and identity design. You can see this in graphic design is my passion to a degree, where the individual elements can be used on their own to denote a reference to the entire meme. Red Papyrus will never strike me the same way. But to be even more clear, I’m going to dissect another example here.
Here’s the meme we’ll be discussing. It is kind of ransom note-y. Three fonts. Pieces jigsawed together to make something that’s ultimately impressively obtuse. But the meaning is clear to anyone familiar with the. underlying memes
First there’s the base, a meme called Is this a pigeon? based the original quote. It’s a screenshot from a relatively obscure 90s anime called The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird. This took off as a meme in 2018, used to express sincere confusion or mock others for theirs. This meme was tweeted by Netflix early in the resurgence of its use, and it’s a popular base for reinterpretations.
Next, there’s the enslaved moisture meme. It belongs to the group of memes referred to in general as surreal. This is meme man, he appears in a lot of these types of memes, and in this he introduces a humorous term for bottled water. As far as I can tell, the joke was mostly in calling things “enslaved x”, re-contextualizing them. Of course, there were a billion different variations.
Finally, there’s a screenshot from American sketch show Tim & Eric, referred to on its own as it’s free real estate. The episode with this shot originally aired in 2009, but the screenshot on its own became its own meme in 2018. It preserves the vibe of the original sketch, the feeling of a smarmy used car salesman. It’s been remixed a million times, to the point where the text itself is recognizable. It helps that it’s not any system normal font — there’s no crossing this out and replacing it. So, meme-makers innovated. They cut the text out and use it, or put other peoples faces over the original.
That brings us to the original image. The “free” from it’s free real estate, and the enslaved moisture combine with the original Is this a pigeon? background image to convey one coherent message. Tap water might appear free, but it isn’t.
This meaning was stitched together from this quilt of references. As McCulloch notes, memes are not the language of formality. Rather, they’re approachable. Their stitched-together nature encourages others to participate and try their own, adding images or words to create a brand new meaning. In a sense, it’s democratized design.
So. Let’s recap. We’ve reviewed the history of a few memes in particular. We’ve looked at the purpose type serves in memes, and how it takes on a meaning of its own. With all this in mind, it is not even remotely up for debate that meme creators use text in thoughtful ways. As designers, we’re taught to consider the words that we typeset with in our work — meme makers do this fluently. There’s no way to get around the fact they must be recognized as designers.
One of the struggles in assembling this talk was the lack of attribution or other study of memes and internet culture in any form. When Knowyourmeme is able to source creators, in most cases it’s anonymous usernames or accounts. Part of this is the nature of the medium. But some of it is because this information is not considered worth collecting. People rarely claim ownership of memes. In fact, in the broad cultural awareness, an interest in memes is seen as sort of a niche.
But this isn’t just an elective concern, this is something that should affect how every designer, especially those working online, conceives of work. Memes are going to affect how an entire generation will view your design. It is naive to consider familiarity with them as optional.
Recently the MoMA has made efforts to understand memes as art, which many have seen as progress. I would argue that approach isn’t broad enough. Linguistic analysis sometimes uses the view points of synchrony and diachrony — respectively, understanding things in the present or placing them within their broader contexts. Placing memes in the ‘art’ category is synchronistic. They cannot exist outside of their broader context, and that context should include traditional design histories that memes are in many cases acting in direct opposition of. And our view of design as a whole needs to be diachronistic, too. We must recognize the field as it was and is taught — overwhelmingly male, white and straight. Only by confronting that can we make room for new voices.
In her book Because Internet, McCulloch quotes another internet linguist, David Crystal, who wrote in 2011, “The one thing Internet language needs, more than anything else, is good descriptions.” Language isn’t the only thing on the internet in need of description and study. While preparing this talk, I came across this tweet, pointing out how eliminating context means type designers get to “tell a story about being inspired by unspecified anonymous documents rather than crediting humans.” This is not a new problem. Type is in dire need of context, of a diachronistic point of view. More than that, we need to expand our definitions of design to include people left behind by traditional histories — not just those making memes, but women, BIPOC, and queer people who have been here all along.
