Internet memes as a cultural phenomenon have a rich history that stretches back to the earliest days of online communication, and the image macro format that most people associate with memes has specific visual conventions rooted in practical design decisions.

The term "meme" was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, describing a unit of cultural information that spreads from person to person through imitation, analogous to how genes spread through biological reproduction. The internet adopted and transformed this concept, with internet memes evolving from simple text-based jokes on Usenet and early forums into the rich visual medium we know today. Image macros, the format of a photograph with superimposed text at the top and bottom, emerged from Something Awful forums and 4chan in the mid-2000s and became the dominant meme format through sites like Reddit, Imgur, and later Instagram and Twitter.

The Impact font became the de facto standard for meme text through a combination of practical and historical factors. Impact was designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 as a headline typeface optimized for maximum visual impact at large sizes in print advertising. Its extremely bold weight, condensed proportions, and high x-height make it highly legible at any size and over any background. When early meme creators needed text that would be readable over varied photographic backgrounds, Impact with a black outline (stroke) on white fill proved ideal because the high-contrast combination ensures legibility regardless of the underlying image brightness or color. This convention became self-reinforcing: new meme creators mimicked the style of existing memes, cementing Impact as the expected and recognized meme typeface.

The technical implementation of meme text uses text rendering with stroke (outline) and fill. The text stroke is drawn first as a thicker version of the text in black, then the text fill is drawn on top in white, creating the characteristic white-text-with-black-outline appearance. The stroke width (typically 2-4 pixels) must be sufficient to create a visible outline without overwhelming the text. This technique is implemented in HTML5 Canvas using strokeText() followed by fillText(), or in CSS using the text-stroke property or multiple text-shadow values. The visual result is text that reads clearly over both light and dark image regions, which is essential for the meme format where text must be legible regardless of the background photograph content.