Being able to guess that the person who made the meme may speak more than one language based on the font used is fascinating!

My wife is a professional graphic designer who loves logos and typeface and I am a tech nerd who loves obscure facts. Please never stop making these videos.

Figuring out the platform and even the region of a meme's creator has definitely blown my mind. This sub is such a gem, it deserves more views!

A bit late to the party, but I have a theory about the meme with the typeface you identified as Product Sans. I think the font might actually be Google Sans, a variation of Product Sans made to be more legible in headers and short body texts for use in G-suite products and stock Android exclusively in Pixel phones. The person who made that meme probably did so with the Google Photos image editor on a Pixel phone, which has Google Sans available. I use Google Sans in my design job sometimes, when I need to replicate Android system UI in layouts. Also, I have a Pixel 4 :).

impact font is still used heavily in more ironic contexts to go along with memes that parody the behavior of early internet users or people that are generally bad at meme creation design

posts meme: noone: Linus: *I know where you are from!!1!*

The production value is fantastic!

And there's me, using CD Fedra for memes, because I just like the corporate font of Czech Railways.

6:52 I think the Source Serif Pro is meant to imitate the "Free Real Estate" font. As for Impact, I doubt convenience is the whole story. When I think of making a meme, the option of using impact is always present in the back of my head, but I think over time its meaning has changed from "epic meme font" to "vintage meme font" at best (if used consciously in the right context) and "Facebook meme font" at worst (may be used ironically), implying use by normies and boomers (Karens even) with a limited understanding of what a meme can be. To me, it appears as if the implicit rule is "don't use Impact unless you have a reason to". I may be biased though, since I already avoid these larger subs and may well be some kind of meme elitist.

6:09 It might be an app developer or designer who installed it to make authentic mockups. SF Pro is the system font for iOS, iPad OS, macOS, and tvOS.

I know there's only like 10 million ethnic Bulgarians worldwide but damn. The fact that you even considered the "It's a Russian troll" possibility seems crazy to me.

I found this channel from Jay Foreman's tweet about the boroughs and it's very impressive for such a new channel. Interesting content and good production values, keep it up! :)

Loved this! My partner was watching it with me and said that Libra Sans was the default for LibreOffice- so it could have come from something like that? (For reference he uses this from the UK)

2:58 - The one on the left isn't Roboto. The *e* and several other details like the round dots don't match up at all. Not sure what it is. The one on the right is Roboto through and through. Google used this classic Holo Roboto (imho notable for the iconic *R*, *K* and *1*) in the Android Holo design era from Honeycomb until ICS, before the Material Design refresh in Lollipop, where it (and notably the aforementioned letters) got slightly redesigned. So that look can't really be pinpointed to a certain non-english font, could be any other Roboto based one, an older phone, someone who just had both laying around and likes the classic one more (like me), or it could be that the editor still has the older Roboto included (e.g. Pixlr Express). Also I'd say that Product Sans was popular among enthusiasts (I extracted it from some PDF, or ripped the woff2 from one of their servers, converting it to otf, quickly after Google started using it, to just have it around), but now it more widely available/popular generally. But it's so fantastic to see a way too underrated channel about nerdy niche stuff like this!

CORRECTION! at 3:00 the font on the left is actually called Aileron. Just a little correction

I wonder how many memes have been made using Liberation Sans? It's interesting because I believe it's the default font in LibreOffice and GIMP, which would give useful information about how many people have eschewed Adobe, Apple and Microsoft products to seek out open-source alternatives.

Now I feel very old cause it's the first time I've heard of Canva and you are calling it the lowest effort program that should come to mind immediately. And yes, I'm always reaching for either Impact or Comic Sans for my captions.

I didn't expect a forensic analysis of meme fonts to be so exciting!

Are we sure the old Roboto is a Hindi font? If I remember correctly, Roboto has publicly gone through multiple revisions between versions of Android - is it possible someone just has an old phone whose manufacturer hasn't updated them to newer versions of Android and so their default font just is the older Roboto?

Holy crap, i been watching a couple videos now i would have assumed you would have some sort of cult following from your production quality. It surprised the hell out of me to see less than a thousand views on such a quality video. You earned a sub.

How do you know that it's that foriegn font that copied an older version of Roboto and not just a re-posted meme from when that was the newest version of Roboto?

I can't believe you found a Cyrillic poster and instantly accused them of being a russian bot. Absolutely insane.

"Black sphynx of quartz judge my vow" is only a pangram if you spell sphinx with an i. I expected better from you, Linus!

As a designer who's most likely going to start making some of my own design-related content on here, you are my favorite channel by far. Love your stuff!!!

Love your channel! Keep up the great work. I studied some graphic design in school and can’t unsee all the poor typography, layouts, and logos in daily life. Your channel makes me feel much more normal! I swear it seems like 99% of the population don’t notice the things we do!

Subscription earned, sir. As a fledgeling linguist (a fledgelinguist?) typography is the closest to fine art that I can wrap my head around.

I just discovered your channel yesterday (thank you, KZfaq algorithm) and I am obsessed. Subscribed in a heartbeat, and now I'm stoked to watch the rest of your videos!

Man didn't expect myself to get into fonts.. great channel!

I really struggle with Typography and whenever I try to learn more about it, I find it very.. uff.. complicated and boring =/ but your videos show that it can be really interesting. That was an amazing deepdive.

This just got recommended to me. How come this doesn't have more views? This video is so great!

Seriously loving your channel! You’re charm and knowledge and wit make for a perfect combination!

Your videos really hit the spot! Thanks you I really appreciate the quality

I like your analysis. Brilliant!!

brilliant video! it honestly blew my mind ✨ looking forward for the next ones!

The journey you took us on with this video is so interesting! 😮

Loving all the videos on this channel !

Just found your videos. Flippin' awesome. Keep up the great work, sir!

As a Bulgarian with mild amateurish interest in typography, I immediately recognized Libra Sans. At first it struck me as odd you haven't heard of the font, because (at least in my experience) most Bulgarians are as familiar with Libra Sans as they are with, say, if not Calibri, then with Roboto Slab.

Actually an interesting direction from analysing memes. Nice vid

This is very fascinating!!! Really enjoyed it! :)

I’m pretty sure that the Product Sans meme was made with an online “meme creation” service that lets you make image macros in the style of twitter screenshots. That’s the default font they use on that service I’ve seen tons of memes that look like that.

Hello! Loved the video! Just wanted to say that in less used meme subreddits, impact font is used to add a layer of irony to memes, so it is very much still on top in some places!

I love this channel; recently been working on a font transition for a project I'm a part of and I've fallen into rewatching all your videos on type What I did not expect was to pay attention to your microphone. I recently got a new mic for voice recording, and on watching this video I recognized yours as the same one I got! That was an incredibly unexpected but entirely welcome dose of validation

Great forensic typography channel. Hope your channel grow!

This was a really interesting and weirdly informative video! Thanks for making it!

Absolutely amazing video! What a gem.

The idea that non-english fonts are disinformation agents is a little ridiculous. Those things happen for sure, but there are so many people who don't just speak english, there's no reason someone who uses one of those fonts has ill intent.

What a wonderfully in-depth and informative video!

I feel called out -- I use Product Sans in some of my personal typesetting. It's a gorgeous geometric typeface, and there isn't really a comparable alternative that has the same flair.

this is the most niche video I've ever been super interested in haha

This is superb! I really like what you are doing! a future video idea; The world behind Typefaces and copyright law. and commercial uses of open typography, such as microsoft, apple and google fonts. :)

5:03 It's actually Google Sans a variation of Product Sans

That Source font family is a great one. It has stuff for Latin, in addition to CJK. It’s from Adobe. Also, I found out you helped with the Atkinson Hyperlegible font from the Braille people. That’s pretty cool. It’s good for captions.

Great work man! You just earned a new subscriber. Keep going! :)

Mate your channel is blowing up, it's all over my recommendations and you have like 6,000 more subs than you did yesterday! Nice work!

Very interesting video, very happy I came across your channel. Keep up the great work.

Dude. What a voice, really relaxing. Also interesting video

Hello again! This video was surprisingly interesting! I'm going to share it! Also could you do a video on flags / coats of arms / logos of countries, or counties of England

ngl, I honestly didn't expect this video to actually be that interesting, and here I am nonetheless, eleven minutes later, smacking that subscribe button

A video we never knew we needed

Cool video! Immediately subscribed!

I'm two years late, but as you mentionned Roboto originally had a curvy leg, but then was updated to have a straight one. But the presence of that old "R" curvy leg could simply mean that someone hasn't updated the Roboto font they downloaded on their computer. I know it happened to me for quite some time (because I don't pay *that* close of an attention to updates to my fonts)

I love the forensics level approach here. It almost feels like the kind of thing I would see on a CSI or Criminal Minds type series to help narrow down a profile for the unsub.

That's so interesting and just, so entertaining to know these completely obscured facts XD

If you ever do another video like this a subreddit like "starterpacks" would be an interesting lookthrough, as that sub has much more text and several images per post.

Just discovered channel, love the content 👌 keep it up man

Why was this video so good

First vid of yours Ive seen such a nice soothing voice

Would be interested to see how this has changed nearly 3 years later and with a wider selection of subreddits. Including cross-platform screenshots (e.g. Twitter to Reddit or 4chan to Tumblr) might produce interesting results and allow us to get an idea of how posts "flow" between platforms

I AM VERY PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE i was able to come to a hypothesis as to what font the "It's Free Real Estate" (the bottom caption of the image at 06:54) meme uses. It seems to be a bold variation of the font Abril Fatface. I would love to know what font it could actually be, because I was very proud and happy to just look at it and go "it's Abril Fatface." thanks linus i love your videos and the little typenerd community you've built on your channel. happy 2023 yall

It's crazy how much you can learn about someone just by analyzing the font !

I’m flabbergasted that Impact was so low! All this time I’ve been making sure to specifically use it whilst everyone else is just going rogue.

Best channel under 20k subs. Facts

i immediately recognized the font at 6:07 as the one used for instagram stories on ios, so i imagine that was probably how those memes were made

Roboto once had a curved R leg. It was in a later update that Roboto got a straight leg, probably when Material rolled around because I think Android used Open Sans until Honeycomb (3) or ICS (4.0) and stuck since until likely Lollipop (5) Interestingly enough, Product Sans was used in Oreo (8) for parts of the system font, so that has to be looked deeper into...

Great vid! I'm a product designer who uses SF Pro and Product Sans quite a bit. Unfortunately, never thought to use them for memes. I just use Helvetica, cause that's what dominated before the Impact phase. I've also used Libra Sans before - I think cause the author once offered it as a free font on either dribbble or behance.

Awesome video! Sleeping kitty spotted near the end...

interesting how impact has made a huge ironic return. on instagram, the most popular kinds of memes all seem to be screenshots of others' posts right now, which often use the default instagram story font, the whisper font, two of the tiktok fonts, and the default facebook post font. however, most of these don't really fall under the "image macro" category. whisper certainly does, at least in the original post, but i'm not sure if posting a screenshot of another's post makes the text no longer count as your own. anyway, i digress, point is a lot of the most popular memes now on instagram have fonts from other social media sites *if* they can be counted. reddit, on the other hand, is largely the same as when you pulled your data, with the exception of impact's return

5:05 I doubt it. It must be a default somewhere - a Pixel phone, a built-in Google app - I consider it unlikely that someone would install a font for that. Same for the San Fransisco font: perhaps a premium pro deluxe iPad app uses it. 8:00 ‘Libra Sans’ - it’s _Liberation Sans,_ which is the default Linux substitute for Arial. Libra Sans, as it says on the webpage at 8:13, is an extension to the Liberation font family. People do not look further than defaults. Picking a default font is _‘not a choice, but the absence of a choice’_ - Matthew Butterick

very informative!

That’s absolutely fascinating

I'm an Indian and I can say your pronunciation of Devanagri was very correct. kudos 👏🏼

That is some Sherlock Holmes-esque analysis

Source Serif (and Sans and Mono) were Adobe’s first open source fonts. I think they’re quite nice looking. It’s a good set of default fonts for personal needs.

Libra Sans looks just like Liberation Sans and Arimo, both open-source metrically compatible Arial replacements. Arimo is used on Chromebooks. Back when I was using school Chromebooks, if I tried to type in Arial on a Google Doc (the default font on Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides), it would actually type in Arimo.

A note, which may be helpful: Anton Black is available for free in the widely used Pics Art application. At the same time Arial can be found in the (now dying) Photoshop Mix application. Perhaps there's a little analytical error there, as both are cross-platform.

I am currently studying forensic linguistics, where (put really simply) we learn how to notice certain styles and idiosyncrasies in speech and writing, that can be linked to other identifying characteristics (like who the individual is, their native language, their gender, age, etc.). This is a really fascinating addition to that knowledge, and I wonder if it will be added to forensic linguistic courses in the future, I hope so!

this is such an interesting discussion! also imma be real i have never heard of canva in my life godbless

Hey Linus, thanks for the video! Not sure if the historic data can be found in the Reddit API, but we can surely take / use snapshots of the daily top list in order to have historic data available eventually.

I use SF on Linux because I like how it looks lol, particularly SF display or whatever it's called, for obvious reasons.

Shut the front door! This was really interesting 🙌🌟

I used Impact and MSPaint to create a meme to send to a colleague this week and I feel old

Well dang very nice video

Whenever I have made memes, I tend to use online photoshop like editors and often use a comic based font like Comic Book.

It’s at this point Catswell realized she was font nerd. Subscribed

Fun fact: the Eurovision logo is also the Gotham font (not Eurovision itself but the song contest part + host city)

SF Pro (6:08) looks a lot like the default "classic" font when making an Instagram story, but I didn't do a pixel analysis so it could just be a lookalike.

Imagine leaking your home address because of a font

Impact is still super popular but mostly in ironic memes

I used to think I was a typefaces nerd. I bow to you, sir.