The image macro

A picture with words laid over it — traditionally one line at the top and one at the bottom, in white Impact with a heavy black stroke so that it stays legible over anything. The type choice is not an aesthetic decision: Impact was the condensed bold face shipped with Windows, so it was the one everybody had.

It first appeared in 2007, during early YouTube.

This is the grammar underneath a decade of internet humour, and the reason a joke could be understood instantly by somebody who had never seen that particular picture. The template is the unit: a stock character with a fixed meaning — the unlucky one, the selfish one, the triumphant baby — plus two lines the reader supplies. Lolcats are the first widely recognised instance; Advice Animals are the form at its most systematic.

The macro was displaced by screenshot-and-caption formats, then by short video, and the Impact convention now reads as deliberately dated — used ironically, or by people whose first internet was the 2010s. It remains the most widely reproduced visual convention the internet has produced.