Cowhand
Tabular Type Foundry · Toshi Omagari · 2015
A Western-style display typeface that automatically compresses or expands each character so that any word, regardless of letter count, fills a fixed block width.
About
Designed during a 3.5-day Font Marathon at Monotype's New York office in 2015, Cowhand draws its conceptual inspiration from the Chinese calligrapher Xu Bing, who renders English words as if they were ideographs occupying a uniform square. The horizontally stressed Western serif style was chosen specifically because it keeps strokes thin while retaining density across the extreme width interpolations required to support words of one to twenty letters. A further invention allows character outlines to extend beyond the monospace body to simulate kerning between problematic pairs such as LT, making it what the designer claims is the first monospaced typeface with effective kerning.
Classification
A horizontally stressed Western-style display typeface chosen deliberately for its ability to maintain thin strokes and dense fill across dramatic width variations, from a single very wide character to tightly compressed 20-letter words.