I released Burpology on November 3, 2021. It originated from a project where I needed bubble-style lettering for personalized dog leashes and couldn’t find an existing typeface that worked. The design drew on the 1960s and 1970s soft cartoon lettering tradition, with references to fonts like West Bubblegum and branding styles such as Bubble Yum and Burger King.

I constructed the characters digitally in FontLab rather than starting on paper. To avoid the uniform look that comes from placing control points at orthogonal extremes, I rotated each glyph 45 degrees, simplified and cleaned up the shapes, then rotated them back and corrected the results. This rotation trick produced smoother, more irregular outlines that contributed to the playful feel. The forms are heavy with small counters, tightly spaced, and intentionally uneven.

To reinforce the hand-drawn impression, I included 79 alternate glyphs that are automatically substituted through OpenType’s shuffling feature. This provided variation in repeated letters and numerals, helping the font avoid mechanical repetition. Burpology has remained a single-style family and has not been updated since its release. I have not seen it appear in notable projects.