Stylogenyin the style of Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Digital native · 2003–present · Global / networked, North America

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Also known as Internet Ugly aesthetic, Image macro style, MS Paint aesthetic

A deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014. Figures are drawn with a mouse in MS Paint, photos are found and crudely pasted together, and captions shout in white Impact capitals with a black outline, top and bottom, or in Comic Sans. Re-saving and 'deep-frying' wear the pixels down. The joke's setup and punchline are the layout, and every template is made for a crowd to copy; some are clean stock photos that only the labels make a meme.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices, until its AI image is made.

Use it with care

Most meme templates are photographs of real people, often children, or licensed stock. Success Kid is Laney Griner's son: the photo has been licensed to advertisers, and in January 2020 she sent a cease-and-desist letter to a congressman whose fundraising campaign used it without permission. Distracted Boyfriend is microstock, and its photographer says use without a proper licence is not allowed. License a template or make a new picture for commercial or political work. Check what a format means now: some characters that spread through 4chan were taken up as hate symbols (the ADL listed Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie's 2005 Boy's Club character, in 2016, while noting that most uses are not hateful). Reaction images of Black people posted by non-Black users and brands read as digital blackface (Lauren Michele Jackson, Teen Vogue, 2017), and deep-fried memes came out of Black Twitter, so credit where formats come from. When brands and campaigns borrow a format, its makers often protest or drop it (Douglas).

01

How it works

  • Caption a found photo or reaction face in white all-caps Impact with a black outline: the setup centred along the top, the punchline along the bottom.
  • Draw with the mouse in MS Paint or another default editor: wobbly outlines, stick figures and exaggerated faces, flat bucket fills, no shading and no corrections.
  • Take pictures as found (stock photos, screenshots, film stills, existing rage faces, even a crude 3D head such as Meme Man) and paste them together with the seams and leftover white backgrounds showing.
  • Let the joke build the layout: setup before punchline, panels read in order, or labels dropped onto a template everyone already knows.
  • Keep the defaults and the damage: Comic Sans and system fonts, JPEG artefacts from repeated re-saving, and for deep-fried memes, blown-out saturation, noise, stacked filters, glowing eyes and emoji pasted at random sizes.
  • Make it fast and easy to copy so others can swap the words and pass it on; visible polish marks an outsider.

English-language forums and imageboards (Something Awful, 4chan), then Reddit, Tumblr, Black Twitter and other social platforms; named by Nick Douglas in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2014

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Modular grid, Chrome & 3D render, Gloss & highlights, Soft extrusion, Flat vector illustration, Luxurious & glamorous, Authoritative & institutional, Rational & objective

Palette

  • #ffffff
  • #000000
  • #ed1c24
  • #fff200
  • #00a2e8
  • #ff7f27

Typefaces

  • Impact (Geoffrey Lee, Stephenson Blake, 1965), set white with a black outline

  • Arial Black, an alternative heavy sans for lolcat captions

  • Comic Sans MS (Vincent Connare, Microsoft, 1994), as in Doge

  • Mouse-drawn lettering in MS Paint and similar default editors

Known for

  • O RLY? (c. 2003)

    an Impact caption on John White's 2001 photo of a snowy owl

  • Lolcats, from 4chan's 'Caturday' cat pictures (c. 2005) to I Can Has Cheezburger?

    first image January 2007

  • Rage comics and rage faces (4chan /b/, 2008), including Trollface

    Carlos Ramirez, 2008

  • Advice-animal image macros such as Success Kid, Scumbag Steve and Bad Luck Brian

  • Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

    blog from 2009, drawn in Paintbrush; book 2013

  • Doge (2013)

    multicoloured Comic Sans phrases in broken English around Atsuko Sato's 2010 photo of the Shiba Inu Kabosu

  • Meme Man, a crude grey 3D-rendered head (earliest known August 2014), in surreal memes such as 'Stonks'

    2017

  • Deep-fried memes

    term first known on Tumblr, March 2015; spread from Black Twitter; r/DeepFriedMemes from October 2015

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleInternet Ugly & Meme Vernacular2003–present · Global / networked, North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Nick Douglas, 'It's Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic', Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), December 2014, pp. 314–339, doi:10.1177/1470412914544516
  2. Kate Brideau & Charles Berret, 'A Brief Introduction to Impact: "The Meme Font"', Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), 2014, p. 307 ff.
  3. Patrick Davison, 'Because of the Pixels: On the History, Form, and Influence of MS Paint', Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), 2014, p. 275 ff.
  4. Limor Shifman, 'The Cultural Logic of Photo-Based Meme Genres', Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), 2014, p. 340 ff.
  5. Special issue contents: newmediaculture.uoregon.edu/?p=2398
  6. Louise Matsakis, 'How to Deep-Fry a Meme', Vice (30 August 2017)
  7. Know Your Meme: 'Deep Fried Memes' (earliest known use of the term on Tumblr, 24 March 2015; r/DeepFriedMemes from 6 October 2015), 'Glowing Eyes / Laser Eyes' (the effect taken into deep-fried filters), 'Meme Man' (August 2014; 'Stonks', 5 June 2017)
  8. Lauren Michele Jackson, 'We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs', Teen Vogue (2 August 2017), teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs
  9. Wikipedia: 'Image macro', 'Lolcat', 'Rage comic', 'Hyperbole and a Half', 'Doge (meme)', 'Impact (typeface)', 'Distracted boyfriend meme', 'O RLY?', 'Success Kid', 'Pepe the Frog', 'Digital blackface'

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.