Nakagawa mentions that he followed with, intended to be the dog version of the cat-centric Cheezburger. It wasn’t just the sheer popularity of that single meme, he says, though that didn’t hurt. “When I did Cheezburger, I’m sure we helped Impact’s case,” he says. That photo started the I Can Has Cheezburger empire – and probably helped cement the usage of Impact, says Nakagawa, who has since moved on to other projects as an adviser. The caption, in Impact, read, “I can has cheezburger?” In response, a friend sent him a picture of a goofy cat from a Russian cat food commercial that had been making the rounds since at least 2003. Software developer Eric Nakagawa was having a bad day and put out a request for funny photos. “I believe the first time the font face changed to Impact was when somebody posted an image of a very obese black woman wearing a spandex superhero outfit, and the text just said ‘DAAAAMN.’ After that, everybody seemed to use Impact,” says Kyanka.įast-forward to 2007. Initially, image macro creators used Arial or Comic Sans (“usually to insult another poster directly,” says Kyanka) but at some point Impact came into play. “After more and more people started obtaining Photoshop is when the image macros really began.” “Originally, people would just post images and then, in the forums, type the text beneath it (usually because they didn’t have Photoshop),” he says via e-mail. Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, founder of the humor site, which credits for coining the term “image macro,” remembers a distinct progression to the current look. It wasn’t long before image macros – the graphic jokes initially passed around on bulletin boards or on e-mail – started incorporating Impact. All of these details led to Impact’s widespread use. Microsoft had a set of “core fonts,” which also included Georgia, Times New Roman and the much-derided Comic Sans, which would look similar regardless of the computer you were using. Moreover, adds design consultant Sam Berlow of the Boston-based Font Bureau, it was “Web-safe,” compatible across the then-young World Wide Web. Given the dominance of Windows systems and the freeware Microsoft included – MS Paint and the like – it was a typeface shared by millions of Windows users at a time Windows had more than 90% of the PC market. In those kludgy 1990s days, Microsoft only included a relative handful of typefaces, and Impact was “the big, bold font people had, by default, in their Windows computers,” says Rotolo. Impact, which was initially created in 1965, was one of the fonts included in early Microsoft Windows operating systems. Part of it is simple convenience, says Anthony Rotolo, a professor at Syracuse University who studies social media. Well, why Impact? Why not Arial or Copperplate or Futura? How did this particular typeface become the default? Every time you open Facebook, every time you check Tumblr, there they are: photos of newsmakers and animals, Willy Wonka and Buzz Lightyear, accompanied by a few sardonic words in glorious, white-on-black, lightly bordered Impact. Yes, like those other great combinations, there’s something about a photo of Grumpy Cat complemented by a caption in the forceful sans-serif font that – to borrow from Steve Jobs, who most assuredly was not talking about the subject – just works.
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