In the fall of 2012, Cat Frazier was growing frustrated with her graphic design classes at the Pratt Institute, an art and design college in Brooklyn.
It wasn’t the painstaking work of precisely kerning a bit of text that bothered her. It was the aesthetic: the clean, muted palettes and spare layouts that her professors, fellow students and the graphic-design world itself seemed to regard as the prevailing standard of sophistication.
As a diversion, she dug through a website, now defunct, called Internet Archaeology, which preserved pages from the early years of internet design, in the 1990s and early 2000s, on platforms like GeoCities, Blingee and MySpace.
There she found something gloriously different: gaudy colors, tacky design, low-quality graphics and a D.I.Y. ethos that seemed to run counter to everything she was being taught.
“What I enjoy about looking at sites like GeoCities is that personal expression and talking about things was more important than making everything look unique and uniform,” she told the website The Creative Independent in 2017. “You were allowed to be playful with your web design and text.”
That November, she began posting to a Tumblr page she called AnimatedText. Using a suite of programs, some of them over 30 years old, she designed deliberately garish 3-D GIFs of ironic phrases and short, darkly funny sentences:
“My science homework ate my dog.” “Got more swag than friends.” “She’s my manic pixie dream girl minus the ‘pixie dream.’”
Within months, she had thousands of followers; tens of thousands more followed in March 2013, after the rapper Frank Ocean reposted one of her GIFs: “ur not gucci lol.” Her following eventually grew to half a million, many of them design professionals like herself.
Ms. Frazier’s retro-maximalist aesthetic did not exactly represent nostalgia. But her embrace of an earlier, rawer and arguably more fun era of the internet reflected a growing backlash against the corporatization of online life, as the once-wild communities of GeoCities gave way to the blandness of Facebook groups and Twitter threads.
Her work opened the door for designers and artists who pushed against the sleek earth tones of the 2010s with deliberately “bad” designs and an ironically nihilist attitude, exemplified by her first GIF to go viral, “lol nothing matters.”
“I think she was one of the great pop artists of the 21st-century internet culture,” Adrian Chen, a writer and collaborator of Ms. Frazier’s, said in an interview. “In the same way that somebody like Andy Warhol, by reappropriating all of this tossed off or forgotten pop culture of an earlier age, showed how you can really make these things your own.”
Ms. Frazier died on June 29 at a hospital in Oakland, Calif., three weeks after she had been admitted for a heart-related emergency. She was 35. Her sister, Lisa Frazier, confirmed the death, which had not been widely reported at the time.
Catherine Louise Frazier was born on April 5, 1991, in Montgomery, Ala., where her father, Hollis Gorman, was a laborer. Her mother, Annie (McCants) Frazier, raised her. After Ms. Frazier’s death, when she was 10, Cat lived for a time with relatives, and with a foster family in Atlanta.
After graduating from Pratt with a degree in critical and visual studies in 2013, Ms. Frazier worked in design jobs in New York, Las Vegas and California, including for Super Deluxe, an internet-based video production company owned by AT&T.
In interviews she often talked about her frustration with readers who assumed that, as an online creator with a dry, sardonic wit, she had to be a white man. She responded by subtitling the account “dad jokes if your dad was a Black lesbian.”
Ms. Frazier expanded her work beyond AnimatedText. In 2014 she created a separate Tumblr account, “Spinning 3-D Pornhub Comments.” And in 2016 she teamed up with Mr. Chen and the programming and design collective Useless Press to create “Ask Cat,” in which people could text her for advice. She would respond, also by text, then post her advice online, minus personal details.
Along with her sister, her survivors include two other sisters, Diane Mccants and Jacqueline Frazier, and a brother, Timothy Frazier.
Ms. Frazier’s mother had struggled with mental health issues, and Ms. Frazier was keenly aware of the role her art could play in helping people deal with pain, including her own.
“I always describe it as the food you eat at a funeral,” she said in a 2020 interview with the design publication AIGA Eye in Design. “It’s nourishing, and we’re all at this horrible event together, but this is helping us cope so we can talk and laugh about it.”
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