How to Make a LOLCat Image

OMG! I can haz LOLCatz on teh Internetz! If you haven't been living in a closed box for the past five years, you've noticed that the Internet has caught LOLCat fever. It's the Internet meme that wouldn't fade. It's the main business for a handful of sites and blogs all over the web, including LOLCats.com, ICanHazCheezburger, and even - are you ready for this? - the LOLCat Bible Translation Project, a project dedicated to translating the entire Bible into LOLCat pictures and writing.

Jargon

You've no doubt noticed that LOLCat's captions seem to speak in its own language. That is the derivative of various kinds of writing and memes from all over the web. It is a mixture of:

- Leetspeak - Also written "13375p34k", which is the "hacker" and "phreak" form of jargon that's even older than the Internet, having originated in the Warez culture on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) of the 80s and 90s.

- Gamer jargon - The text messages that players of online games send each other to taunt or congratulate. This is where memes like "All your base are belong to us." and "I'm in ur base killin yr dudez!" comes from.

- Text messaging - From early Internet chatrooms to Blackberrys, texters have always chosen to abbreviate their words in order to save time and be able to communicate on a small screen. This is also done for humorous effect. While some people get irritated with the mutation of language and it is arguably difficult to read, you have to admit that it saves space, both in memory and on the screen.

- Baby talk - Many cat owners talk to their own pets in baby babble, so this translates nicely to represent what the cat is "thinking". This is where "cute" misspellings like "haz" for "has" and "cheezburger" for "cheeseburger" come from.

- Your English teacher would have a seizure on the spot just to see it. Here's a handy LOLCat translator for the especially lazy. Now, with all this being said, don't think that you have to use LOLCat-speak in every image. Sometimes the joke is funnier if written in proper English.

Posing

If you have a cat, you have a natural born actor! Cats have a lot of muscles in the face and big, expressive eyes, so they can make almost as many expressions as humans can. Cats are also flexible and acrobatic, so they have a wide variety of poses. And they're naturally alert and curious, so they'll give you plenty of opportunities to catch them exploring and investigating their environment.

The only thing is, cats have a mind of their own. They're harder to train than dogs, so they won't just throw out a pose on command. It's best to just keep a camera handy and snap a picture whenever your cat does something unusual, then think of a caption later.

For encouraging your cat to give you interesting reactions to capture, you need to provide stimulus. Have the TV, radio, or computer on and making noise. Turn on a battery-operated or wind-up toy and have it running around. Remote control cars are great for this! Or use a laser pointer and have the cat chase the little red dot all over the room. Remember, if you capture just the cat without showing what he's chasing, you'll have better opportunities for captioning, in which you can make up whatever story about the situation you want. If you have more than one pet, you'll have even more opportunities for catching a fun pose as they interact, especially if they play with each other.

Captioning

The easiest part is adding the text. Browse LOLCat images on the web for inspiration; sometimes the funniest jokes are reactions to or continuations of current memes. Avoid complex jokes or over-producing your image; part of the charm of LOLCats pictures is that they look clumsy and amateur, just thrown together. Pick a simple, easy-to-read font in a color that stands out from the background. Typically, the caption should be a bold Sans-Serif font in white and all upper-case.

Any image editor will do for this. If you have Photoshop, you're all set, but even Gimp, Paint.NET, Picasa, or Pocket Paint for Windows will do just fine, and they're all free. Or how about... an online LOLCat generator, so you don't even need to download and install software?

Have fun!

Filed Under: The Internetz