Impact ended up in the hands of Monotype. As the firm slowly shifted its focus away from type, it divvied up digital rights among former competitors. Impact was Stephenson Blake's second-to-last typeface. But there's a reason Impact rose above other typefaces with wide, easy-to-read letters: It had distribution.Īs the digital age began, Impact got key placement thanks, in part, to the dissolution of the firm that commissioned the typeface. When Geoff Lee created Impact in the '60s, he couldn't have anticipated that his typeface would become a digital titan. So from the beginning, Impact's thick letters were designed to stand out (similar to its close cousin Haettenschweiler, which is a little narrower).īut it took more than great design for Impact to become the default meme font. This picture from the original brochure looks like a modern meme: It was easy to read its thick letters even without a black outline. Stephenson Blake's early marketing materials show that from the beginning, Impact was valued for its legibility, especially over pictures. A couple of years after creating Impact, Lee sold the typeface to the type foundry Stephenson Blake. In 2004, Geoff Lee told the now-defunct Typophile forum how he designed the typeface back in the day, using hand-cut metal to create each letter. Though Impact feels like the quintessential internet typeface, it was released in 1965. That meme typeface is called Impact (technically, a "font" is a specific version of a typeface, like when it's italicized or in bold). This is from the original Stephenson Blake ad for Impact. The meme font was unleashed in 1965, with a typeface called Impact The answer tells us something about design, business, and how technology can help something stupid find traction. Why do so many memes have the same appearance? Merkel and Putin, memed just like the rest of us. We can't know if this cat is riding an invisible bike or not. If you've spent much time on the internet, you've seen a meme like the ones above: a picture, white words, a black outline, and the same exact font.
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