I released Pop Up Fontio on August 7, 1999. The typeface was built from my earlier design Lockergnome, which I modified by removing curves to create polygonal letterforms. I then imported the shapes into Lightwave, a 3D modeling application, where I extruded each letter and placed it above a modeled jack-in-the-box form. Each character was rendered from slightly different angles to add variation. The name was a reference to the television series Pop-Up Video, which was popular at the time.
Pop Up Fontio was distributed with a free commercial use desktop license for many years. In August 2020, I placed it in the public domain.