Create Memes Quickly and Easily with Word Swag

Steve Caplin

The internet is awash with memes, many taking the form of images with overlaid text. But creating these memes can be a laborious task. Word Swag, which runs on both phones and tablets, aims to solve that problem with an intuitive, feature-packed approach. For the purpose of this article, I used Word Swag on an iPad.

Create Your Image and Text

Start by choosing an image from your own photo library, from the camera, or choose a royalty-free image from Unsplash or Pixabay. Select your chosen format – Instagram square, landscape, portrait and so on – then crop and move your image to best fit the frame. When you add text, by default it appears in a thin white serif font on black slugs.

Change the Style

There are dozens of different text styles to choose from, and dragging over them will show you the selected style using your own text. Each style has an associated font, which can’t be changed.

Run the Variations

There are five buttons to cycle through the variants of each style. If none of these suit your purpose, the Dice button will keep generating more versions until you get one you’re happy with. Note that you’re unable to tweak any of the results manually. Here, for example, the word TOGETHER would be better without the arrows either side, but there’s no way to make this happen.

Filters for Text and Images

A huge range of filters allow you to treat your image so that the text stands out better. You can also apply textures to the text itself, giving thousands of combinations. At any point, you can change the image and text style.

Multiple Text Boxes

You can add more than one text box to an image, and you also have the ability to scale and rotate text at will. If you’re stuck for something to say, you can even ask Word Swag to come up with text for you, under generic titles such as Stay Hungry, Get Hyped, Be Mindful and Classics.

Use Real Fonts

An optional extra is Real Fonts, which take the form of clouds, donuts, flowers, sushi and more. Here, the font and the background image are preset, so you can’t mix and match; you are unable, for instance, to place one of these fonts on your own choice of background.

Trust the Genie

If you’re really stuck for ideas, the Genie will come up with dozens of custom concepts for you, supplying both images and text – and you can then tweak and adapt each one. Word Swag warns that “not all ideas may be relevant”, as we found out when using “hot dog salesman” as the input, which generated a number of images of dogs. Here are some ideas for “local dry cleaners”.

Save and Close

When you’ve finished your design, you can save it to your camera roll, adding your own logo if you wish, and then share it to Instagram, Facebook, Threads and all the usual suspects, as well as messages and emails. Word Swag costs $4.99 a month for access to all the fonts and frames, or $9.99 a month including Real Fonts and AI-powered ideas. Once you’ve decided on your style it’s a real time saver when it comes to generating memes; but the inability to directly manipulate the results is limiting.