How to Make a Meme: Text, Fonts and Layouts That Read in a Second

The main meme formats

The caption-bar style, with a white strip and plain black text above the picture, has largely replaced overlaid Impact on many platforms because it keeps the image clean and holds more words. The meme generator can add caption bars above or below the picture, so you do not have to extend the canvas by hand.

The font and outline that always read

The classic meme font is Impact: tall, heavy and condensed, so a lot of letters fit across the image. It is set in white capitals with a thick black outline, and that combination is the whole trick — white text shows on dark areas, the black outline shows on light ones, so the caption reads wherever it lands.

• Text colour: white.
• Stroke (outline): black, 2–4 pixels on a typical 1000-pixel-wide image; scale it up for larger images.
• Case: capitals for the classic style; sentence case for caption bars.
• Alignment: centred.
• On a very busy photo: turn on a background box — a semi-transparent black rectangle behind the text — instead of making the outline thicker.

The meme fonts are delivered with the page, so your caption looks the same on any device, rather than falling back to whatever font the phone happens to have.

Writing captions people get instantly

A meme is glanced at, not read. In a scrolling feed you have roughly the time it takes a thumb to pause. Some rules of thumb that hold across formats:

• Keep each caption to one line, two at most. If it needs three, it probably wants the caption-bar layout.
• Put the set-up first and the punchline last. Top to bottom is reading order; do not make people read the bottom first.
• Do not cover the face. The expression in a reaction image is half the joke. Move the text to the background or a bar.
• Use the template's convention. People already know how Drake or Two Buttons works. Fighting the format makes it harder to read.
• Cut every word you can. "Me when" does a lot of work in two words.

Size and format for each platform

The meme generator can resize the canvas to common shapes — square, portrait, story and landscape — so the meme is not cropped when you post it.

Text is drawn at the image's own pixel size, so a tiny source image gives jagged, blurry text. Start with an image at least 800 pixels wide; if the only copy is small, enlarge it with the image upscaler before adding text. Every platform recompresses what you upload, so save as PNG to keep the outline sharp until then. Full dimensions for every network are in social media image sizes.

Stickers, faces and image adjustments

Many memes paste a face or object onto another picture. Cut the face out with the background remover, save it as a transparent PNG, then add it to your meme as a sticker layer that you can move, resize and rotate. The free plan allows three sticker layers per meme, which covers almost any layout; Pro removes the limit and captions a batch of images to a single ZIP.

The Image tab has brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, sepia and greyscale adjustments, plus flip and 90° rotation. Darkening or blurring the photo slightly behind a long caption is often better than adding a heavier outline.

Animated memes and video stills

The meme generator works on a still canvas, so an animated GIF uses its first frame. To caption the whole animation, use Add Text to GIF, which writes the text onto every frame. To turn a moment from a video into a meme, first save it as an image with the frame grabber — see extracting a frame from a video.

A word on images you do not own

Memes are built from other people's photos, and in most places sharing a meme for fun is tolerated. Using one in advertising, on merchandise or in a brand's marketing is a different matter: the photo's owner, and any recognisable person in it, may have rights over that use. For business accounts, use your own photos, licensed stock images or templates that clearly allow commercial use. Your meme stays on your device until you choose to post it; nothing is uploaded while you edit.