Cowhand is a display typeface designed by Toshi Omagari to keep words at one specific width. Words of one letter will have one very wide character, words of two letters will have characters of half that width and so forth. At the maximum of 20-letter words, characters become very tightly compressed. The design of the Cowhand typeface is inspired by western style block printing with reverse stress that is characterised by chunky slab serifs. This Lite version of the typeface was designed as part of a font marathon over the course of 3.5 days in Monotype’s NY office. Please Note: these "Lite" fonts are offered with a limited character set. Monotype is proud to support Room to Read’s work in literacy and girls’ education through our font marathon initiative.

Anyone old enough to remember either the radio or television version of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” pictures Ozzie Nelson as the easygoing father figure who never seemed to have a real job – he was always hanging around the house. In truth, the handsome young Ozzie was a bandleader in the 1930s and 1940s and ended up marrying his ‘girl singer’, Harriet Hilliard. A piece of sheet music from 1933 for “You Have Taken My Heart” was one of the songs Nelson featured with his Columbia Broadcasting System Orchestra. The title was hand lettered in what can only be described as a slightly eccentric Art Deco Sans serif. Redrawn and cleaned up to reflect more uniform stroke weights, Bandshell JNL is now available in both regular and oblique versions.

During the spring of 2006, while creating this typeface, I was reading Praying For Gil Hodges, by Tom Oliphant, who grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. I grew up a Los Angeles Dodgers fan. My mother worked as secretary to the president of the old Triple A LA Angels Baseball Team. In 1952 when she was pregnant with me, she left the team. They gave her an autographed baseball and a puppy named Angel. That's the dog I grew up with. Toward the end of the book the author talks about Gil Hodges' favorite ballplayer, a slugger for the LA Angels, Jigger Statz. I thought, could it be? My mother died two years ago and I got the team baseball. Sure enough, the first name after the dedication to my mother was Jigger Statz.