How to Create Meme

This article shows you how to create a basic online meme. Memes are funny images and text that are often created based on current events, videos or images that have gone viral on the internet and current humorous trends.

Table of Contents

Understanding memes

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Know what a meme is. Memes are usually amusing or satirical content (such as photos or videos) that is shared with many people. Memes are often created in a way that combines a seemingly ordinary photo with funny text, combines a ridiculous photo with a witty caption, or adds new context to the content. ^{[1] X Research Source}

The word “meme” stands for “memetics,” which means the study of popular principles, philosophies, or content.
Memes can include many different types of content, so it can be difficult to determine which category the meme falls under.

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Know different types of memes. Although there are countless sub-types of memes, some of the main ones can be mentioned as follows: ^{[2] X Research Source}

A traditional (or “casual” ) meme is a photo or screenshot from a viral movie, video, or magazine. These photos often have text that matches the overall spirit of what’s being added.
Old-fashioned memes are often amusing in a crappy or contextless way. In addition, the old meme often tries to rebuild the popularity of the forgotten or gradually forgotten meme by using it continuously.

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Understand how funny memes are. Since memes are often amusing images based on current events, the meme’s humor can be insensitive or socially inappropriate. Memes are also often amusing in a silly or nonsensical way, with the idea that the meme’s ridiculous nature is entertaining.

One example of a meme that’s funny in an emotionless way is the popularity of a meme about the gorilla Harambe after it was shot and killed by a Cincinnati zoo employee.
An example of a funny meme in a silly way is the habit of using music with no bass or distorted audio to emphasize a moment in a video.

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Learn about the memes that are popular right now. To get a sense of what content counts as a meme, search for memes that appeared this year. You can also narrow down your search by filtering by month.

Example: Type January 2018 memes into a search engine to find memes related to virtual reality chat phenomenon “Ugandan Knuckles”, some funny memes about Tide, and memes about the US government shutdown.
You can also dig into today’s popular videos and images if you want to try to predict what the upcoming meme will be.

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Mention the meme or other viral video in your meme. When creating a meme, you can mention popular events, books, movies, video games, and more to increase the meme’s amusing level.

For example, memes with lots of accident videos (such as bike crashes) can remind viewers of the Call of Duty game “killing enemies through the stage”.

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Combine two conflicting things. Combining an ordinary image with unusual text (or vice versa) can make a meme strange, meaningless, but that is often the nature of memes that go viral online.

Example: Combining a still image of Winnie the Pooh with a slightly obscene humour is a great way to create a cheesy laugh.

Create a traditional meme

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Open ImgFlip. Go to https://imgflip.com/ using a browser on your computer. ImgFlip is one of the most comprehensive meme databases out there that allows you to upload your own photos to create memes. ^{[3] X Research Sources}

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Select Create . This button is located at the top left of the page. When you hover your mouse pointer over it, you’ll see a drop-down menu.

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Click Caption a Meme or Image . It’s in the drop-down menu. This is the step to open the page with the meme template.

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Photo selection. Scroll through the popular meme templates in the upper-right corner of the page until you find the one you want to use, then click it.

You can also upload your own photo as a meme by clicking Upload your own image in the upper-right corner of the page, clicking Upload image from your device , selecting an image, clicking Open and clicking Upload .
If you want to search for a certain meme, click the “Search all memes” text box on the right side of the page, type the meme name (such as “Harambe”), click the yellow View All Meme Templates button when it appears. , then select your favorite image.

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Enter an image caption. In one or more text boxes on the right side of the page, type the caption you want to use for the picture. Since captions are often easily repositioned, you may need to rearrange the caption text if it doesn’t fit your photo. ^{[4] X Research Sources}

For example, the caption line of a traditional meme is usually horizontal text at the top and bottom of the meme image.
Some memes, such as memes containing a button, will have a caption box for that button.

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Click Generate Meme . This blue button is on the right side of the page. This is the step to create a meme with a selected photo and caption.

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Save Image. When the generated meme appears in the pop-up window, right-click it, then click the Save image option in the drop-down menu that appears. This is the step to save the meme to your computer.

Create a dark meme

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Understand the main principle behind the dark meme. Memes are considered “old-fashioned” when they introduce silly, indecent, meaningless, and/or contradictory concepts (e.g., old-fashioned memes might try to make you laugh about some tragedy). ^{[5] X Research Sources}

Dark memes also tend to refer to old or forgotten memes and/or inappropriate viral content (such as a 2018 meme that mentioned the death of Harambe the gorilla).

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Look for the right image as the basis for the meme. It could be a screenshot of a conversation, an image from popular culture (such as a movie or TV show), or anything else you want to use as a base.

Try to find images that are relevant (such as the Queen of England) or that have nothing to do with current events (such as a photograph of a sunset).

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Open the photo with an editing program. Microsoft Paint is widely used to create old-fashioned memes on Windows computers—in fact, Microsoft Paint itself can also be considered an old-fashioned meme—but Mac users tend to use the service. like Pixlr (online photo editing program).

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Add text to photo. Unlike traditional memes, dark memes often place text in weird, out-of-the-ordinary positions in the image.

For example, you can put words near a person’s mouth if that’s what they’re likely to say.
Many old memes use another way of using text to name objects. A popular old-fashioned meme trend is to take an image of a person throwing a health-changing object at the subject, then refer to that person as “me”, the subject as “the doctor”, and the object as “me”. it’s “an apple a day” (or something like that).
Most photo editors allow you to add text by clicking the “Text” button in the toolbar (usually with an A icon), then clicking or clicking and dragging the pointer over the image.

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Add more content to the photo. Example: Some old-fashioned memes feature famous movie scenes and replace the character’s face with the public’s (or someone’s viral online).

Dark memes aren’t very well-classified, so as long as the image is silly or ridiculous in nature, it can be considered an old-fashioned meme.

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Save Image. After you save the photo to your computer, you are free to upload it to your favorite social networks or meme sites.

You’ll probably need to write your username or signature on the photo to make sure it’s yours.

Advice

Memes can be created as simply showing an image without context, then posting it with the caption “When [context]” (e.g. posting an elephant skeleton with a caption) “When You Overeat on Thanksgiving Day”).

Warning

Memes can be amusing in a cruel way, and the meme community is usually no different. If you’re going to contribute to the meme community, be prepared to see offensive, inappropriate, and/or objectionable content quite often.

Steps

Understanding memes

Create a traditional meme

Create a dark meme

Advice

Warning

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