Soap

I released Soap on June 26, 2006. The design began with a sample of Cooper Black in metal type. I applied a raster blur to the scan, then manually traced over it in FontLab. This softened the outlines and gave the letterforms a rounded, swollen character. To extend the family, I created lowercase letters by redrawing Cooper Black’s lowercase, adjusting their weight so they blended with the softened capitals.

Soap originally launched as a single style. On August 21, 2008, I expanded the family with two textured versions: Stamp, with a distressed look, and Spraypaint, with a rough, stenciled effect. Together with the clean style, the family presented three related variants.

Soap was always a paid typeface and became one of my more successful sellers, particularly after it was added to Adobe’s Creative Cloud library. In 2026, Soap was used for the Dog Day Afternoon Broadway production’s marketing materials. On June 25, 2021, I updated Soap by removing obsolete characters, adding prime marks, adjusting vertical metrics for cross-browser use, and refining kerning and spacing.