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The radical elegance of memes for hard-to-describe feelings

Meme creators are just modern-day collage artists.

Yuna Shin
UX Collective
5 min readSep 28, 2021
For those who don’t know: IYKYK = If You Know You Know.

These 8 words drive modern-day friendships: Did you see the meme I sent you? Online communities with millions of people bond over repurposed images with new captions. The 5–10 seconds of a co-worker interpreting an image, gif, or video of a meme precedes a shared chuckle. Big brands are now leveraging memes for virality and reach.

Underneath the informal tones of memes, there’s a level of sophistication and elegance to how hard-to-describe emotions are communicated. How are memes shaping the way we communicate and process information? What do their spinoff narratives say about current times?

If we boil it down, memes are just modern-day collages that use similar tactics as contemporary collage-artists like German Dada artist Hannah Höch.

Images of viral cat, Kim Kardashian at The Met Gala, and Bernie Sanders with mittens.
Repurposing common imagery with new captions and contexts.

How are memes and photo collages similar?

Memes often use the iconic Impact typeface in all caps with a thin black outline (Vox did a deep-dive on the origin of this “de facto font”). They are widely circulated on the Internet that…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Yuna Shin

Seattle based writer who connects the dots between design, contemporary art, & pop culture. yuna-shin.com.

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