Pupcat

I released Pupcat on July 6, 2001. The design was influenced by 1960s movie poster lettering, especially the style used in the 1964 film The Pleasure Seekers. I wanted to capture that casual, decorative look and turn it into a complete typeface. Pupcat was built as a unicase design: most letters take uppercase forms, but I used the lowercase A, E, and R. Its flared strokes, widening at the ends, added to the retro quality.

The name came from Pepsi, my cat at the time, who I often called “Pupcat.” I began with a single style, distributed under a free commercial use license. In the 2010s, I expanded Pupcat into a family with four weights and italics. Those additions weren’t free but gave designers more flexibility.

The design itself didn’t change after the expansion. On December 10, 2021, I updated Pupcat to fix a technical problem that prevented some styles from appearing in font menus, and I removed deprecated characters. Version 5.2, released in November 2024, further refined the name tables for consistency across applications and added the section sign (§).

Pupcat never became tied to any single project, but I noticed it being used frequently in general design work. It remains one of my more widely seen typefaces, even if it was never associated with a specific brand or title.