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Every meme is in the same typeface.
表情包用的都是同一种字体。
It’s called Impact.
这种字体叫“Impact”。
But how did that happen?
但这究竟是怎么回事呢？
Impact was designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1963.
“Impact”字体是乔弗瑞·李在1963年设计出来的。
It was bold, condensed & sans-serif, in line with the style of the 60s and ideal for short pieces of text and punchy headlines.
粗体，浓缩&无衬线，这种字体符合60年代的字体设计风格，非常适合应用于简短文字或吸睛的标题。
Impact was influenced by a movement called the International Typographic Style or Swiss Style,
这种字体受到了一种叫作国际印刷风格或瑞士风格的运动的影响，
which emphasized readability and cleanliness, with typefaces like Helvetica and Univers.
这种风格强调的是可读性和简洁，字形有点像Helvetica和Univers两种字体。
It took those staid fonts and gave them a dash of mod flavor.
它采用的是稳重的字体，又赋予了它们些许现代气息。
Those were the days of metal typesetting, so Lee had to carve each letter by hand.
当时还是金属排版的年代，所以，每个字李都得手工雕刻。
Lee sold it to the type manufacturer Stephenson Blake.
李把这种字体卖给了打字机制造商斯蒂芬森·布莱克。
This is their original ad for the font.
这是他们最初为这个字体设计的广告。
Impact was later sold to Monotype, another typeface company -- they’re known for creating Times New Roman.
后来，这种字体又被卖给了另一家字体公司Monotype——因为发明了Times New Roman这种字体而为人熟知的字体公司。
And Monotype in turn licensed fonts to Microsoft.
后者又将这种字体授权给了微软。
So that’s how Impact ended up being included in the Windows Operating System which was starting to dominate the market in the 90s.
这就是为什么Impact最终被纳入了Windows的操作系，90年代，Windows系统逐渐开始主导市场。
And in 1996, Microsoft chose 11 “core fonts for the web”, a free, standard font pack that would work across the internet.
1996年，微软选出了11种“核心网络字体”，组成了一个免费的，整个互联网通用的标准字体包。
Impact was one of them.
Impact就是其中之一。
By the way, that’s Webdings.
顺便说一下，这种字体叫Webdings。
That distribution advantage helped Impact become the default in online forums.
这种分布优势帮助Impact成为了在线论坛的默认选项。
Those memes were called ‘image macros’ after ‘macro instructions’,
这些表情包就是所谓的“图片宏”，其名字来源于“宏指令”这一术语，
a term in computer science for a line of code that requests a pre-defined sequence of instructions.
“宏指令”是计算机科学里的一个术语，指的是需要预定义指令序列的一行代码。
And in 2003, one of these image macros — a picture of a cat with the words “I can haz cheezburger” — launched the wave of modern memes.
2003年，其中一张图片宏——一张写着“我可以吃芝士汉堡”的猫的图片——掀起了现代表情包的浪潮。
Several meme-generator sites subsequently adopted Impact as well, adding a black outline on the white font.
几个专门制作表情包的站点随后也引入了Impact这种字体，还给白色字体加了一圈黑色轮廓。
There are more than 11 fonts on the internet now.
如今，网络核心字体已经不止11种了。
But we expect memes to look a certain way, and that includes Impact.
但我们还是希望表情包以某种特定的形式出现，包括使用Impact这种字体。
And that’s probably not going to change anytime soon.
而且，这种趋势短期内可能不会改变。
