The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

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.