A meme format is an argument with a fixed shape. Knowing the shape is most of knowing how to write one.
Every format below carries a structure the picture supplies for free. Drake tells you one thing is being rejected and another approved before you have read a word; Gru's Plan tells you a plan is about to collapse. Write against that structure and the joke lands on its own. Write across it and no amount of good wording will save it.
Each guide says what the format actually argues, what people get wrong with it, and — the part you will not find elsewhere — exactly where the text belongs on the picture. Those rectangles were measured against the real templates rather than guessed from the panel count, which is why the editor puts captions in the right place on formats like Two Buttons and Left Exit 12, where a simple top-and-bottom split produces nonsense.
Most meme tools know only how many caption boxes a format takes, because that is all the public template APIs report. They never say where those boxes sit. So the usual approach is to guess: split the image in half for two captions, into quarters for four, and lay the text flat across the middle.
That guess is right for Drake, which really is two clean halves. It is wrong for most of the rest. Two Buttons puts its text on two buttons photographed at an angle. Change My Mind puts it on a sign on a table. Gru's Plan puts it on four tall, narrow flipchart boards, not four equal quarters. Text laid flat over any of those reads as pasted on, and that is the difference between a meme that looks made and one that looks made in a hurry.
So the boxes on this site were measured — and where a template's text sits on something tilted, the box is tilted to match. Three of the formats here carry a rotation for that reason: Two Buttons, Change My Mind and UNO Draw 25 Cards.
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