Boopee

I released Boopee on December 13, 2004. My goal was to design a hand-drawn typeface that looked authentically imperfect yet still legible. To achieve the awkward, childlike quality I was after, I drew it with my left hand using a marker, then digitized the forms. The result was irregular and loose, but controlled enough to function in real settings.

One of Boopee’s defining features was its use of ligatures. I created about fifty of them, guided partly by digraph frequency tables from cryptology to cover the most common letter pairs. I also designed ligatures for awkward combinations such as “ex” and for cases where the hook of the lowercase g could tuck neatly under a preceding letter. These were implemented as OpenType ligatures rather than stand-alone alternates, so the substitutions occurred automatically in context. The typeface was released in two weights, standard and bold. I imagined it being used in children’s products, where the naive appearance would be most at home.

On June 11, 2021, I updated Boopee with technical refinements. I removed obsolete characters such as L with dot and E with breve, narrowed the ellipsis width, and fixed an inconsistency between the space and non-breaking space. Painter’s quotes were replaced with proper quotation marks, though the reversed versions remain accessible at Unicode 201B and 201F. I also adjusted vertical metrics for better browser compatibility and refined outlines to correct curve errors.

I occasionally saw Boopee used in the late 2000s, mostly in informal children’s contexts, but I haven’t encountered it in any notable projects.