I released Cotton on August 28, 2007. The design was aimed at capturing the look of vintage t-shirts, which often had a worn and distressed quality. I based the letterforms on Sinzano, another of my typefaces, but reworked them significantly. First, I regularized the shapes, then deliberately reintroduced irregularities to suggest natural wear. The defining feature of Cotton was its texture, which I developed from a scan of flaking, painted fabric. This gave the typeface the surface quality of an old screen print rather than a wallpaper-like pattern.

Cotton was an all-caps family. To add variation and reduce repetition, I included OpenType ligatures so that certain letter pairs would produce alternate forms. This helped the text look less mechanical and more like it had been printed onto fabric.

On June 18, 2021, I updated Cotton. I removed deprecated characters, corrected an inconsistency between the space and non-breaking space, and adjusted vertical metrics to improve cross-browser compatibility. Beyond that, the font has not been revised. It has remained relatively obscure, and I have not encountered it in use since its release.