type design is my burden: an exploration of meme typography

Graphic design is at new heights of cultural saturation. With design software ever more accessible and the ubiquity of designed elements across every aspect of modern life, design literacy is becoming less the special skill it once was and more a culture necessity. A common reaction to this new democratization of design is to ignore the work done by nontraditional designers rather than interact with it critically. Within this context, I’d like to open a discussion around meme typography as a developing frontier of expressive typography. To the casual viewer, memes are often confidently incomprehensible. But bad graphic design has become a purposeful aesthetic. Things like jpeg artifacts, gaudy or clashing colors and gradients, and stock images with watermarks have become ironic cultural signifiers. Even more sophisticated design missteps, such as a mismatch between the tone of the information being communicated and the visual tone of the typefaces used, are being purposefully weaponized by meme makers for humor purposes. With all this in mind, I will show that meme makers are as cognizant of the principles of graphic design as any other designer. They select images and type specifically, and use typographic tone competently. They should be a part of recognized design canon. This has broader consequences as well; memes are far from the only type of design being ignored. We need to expand our understanding of what typography is, what design is, and who designers are.