I released Body Goat on March 10, 2010, at a time when web fonts were beginning to gain traction. My goal was to make a hand-painted display typeface that delivered solid shapes efficiently while maintaining a drawn character. I kept the forms square for compactness, and I checked spacing continuously in a non-hinted, low-resolution preview window. In 2010, most laptops and smartphones still had relatively coarse screens, so testing at that scale was essential to ensure the typeface held up.

The workflow was unusually involved. I first built a complete font, exported it, and typed it out in Photoshop. From there, I traced over the output with a tablet, hand-painting the forms to avoid the artificial look of digital filters. I then autotraced and cleaned them, constantly simplifying curves. To optimize loading times, I converted back and forth between Postscript and TrueType outlines, refining the curves until I could reduce them to as few control points as possible. The result was a font that balanced compact file size with a natural, handmade appearance.

On June 11, 2021, I issued an update to improve technical reliability. I removed obsolete characters such as L with dot and E with breve, replaced reversed quotation marks with proper ones, and lowered inverted punctuation marks. I expanded the fractions feature to handle long numerators and denominators, adjusted vertical metrics for better browser compatibility, and refined outlines to remove curve errors. The fi and fl ligatures were removed as unnecessary, and base quotes were tightened.

The name Body Goat was meant as an absurd juxtaposition, with no reference to “greatest of all time.” The typeface was designed as a practical web font, though it has not been taken up in notable projects.