Catherine Louise Frazier, known as Cat Frazier, a graphic designer whose distinctive retro GIFs amassed a large online following, died June 29 at a hospital in Oakland, California. She was 35. Her sister, Lisa Frazier, confirmed the death, which had not been widely reported previously. Frazier had been admitted to the hospital three weeks earlier for a heart-related emergency.

Born April 5, 1991, in Montgomery, Alabama, Frazier was raised by her mother, Annie McCants Frazier, until her mother’s death when Frazier was 10. Following this loss, she spent time living with relatives and a foster family in Atlanta. She later earned a degree in critical and visual studies from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, graduating in 2013.

Frazier first gained prominence in late 2012 while a student at Pratt, when she began creating retro-style animated GIFs inspired by early internet aesthetics. Rejecting the polished, minimalist design favored by many contemporaries, she embraced the vivid colors, low-fidelity graphics, and DIY ethos of 1990s and early 2000s websites built on platforms such as Geocities and Myspace. Her Tumblr page, animatedText, featured deliberately gaudy 3D GIFs paired with ironic or darkly humorous phrases like “My science homework ate my dog” and “she’s my manic pixie dream girl minus the ‘pixie dream.’”

Her following grew rapidly, spiking in March 2013 after rapper Frank Ocean shared one of her GIFs, “ur not gucci lol,” helping her audience reach hundreds of thousands, including many fellow design professionals. Frazier’s work was seen as emblematic of a broader pushback against the sanitized and corporate nature of contemporary internet culture, celebrating instead a rawer, more playful form of digital self-expression.

Colleague Adrian Chen described Frazier as “one of the great pop artists of 21st-century internet culture,” comparing her reappropriation of discarded visual culture to Andy Warhol’s approach to earlier pop iconography.

Beyond animatedText, Frazier expanded her creative output with projects such as “spinning 3d Pornhub comments” on Tumblr in 2014 and “ask cat,” a collaboration launched in 2016 with Chen and the Useless Press collective. The latter allowed users to send text messages seeking advice, which Frazier would respond to privately before sharing anonymized excerpts online.

Throughout her career, Frazier confronted assumptions about her identity, often prompted by her sardonic online persona. She addressed this directly by subtitling her account “dad jokes if your dad was a Black lesbian,” reflecting her own identity and challenging stereotypes about digital creators.

Frazier’s work often engaged with themes of pain and coping. She acknowledged the therapeutic potential of her art, describing it as “the food you eat at a funeral” in a 2020 interview—something that provides nourishment and comfort amid hardship, helping people process grief through shared humor and expression.

Frazier is survived by her sisters Lisa, Diane McCants, and Jacqueline Frazier, and her brother Timothy Frazier.