Francesco Canovaro started designing Bakemono as a way to explore the concept of monowidth type design - the idea of keeping the widths of each glyph constant in all the weights of a type family. This idea, inherent in monospaced typefaces, can add flexibility and ease of use also to proportional type - allowing you to change the weight of a word without changing the position of the other words in the same text block.

It must be said that in common usage, any bizarre apparition can be referred to as a bakemono or an obake whether or not it is believed to have an alternative form, making the terms roughly synonymous with yōkai. A bakemono's true form may be an animal, such as a fox (Kitsune), a raccoon dog (Tanuki), a badger (Mujina) or a transforming cat (Bakeneko). It could be the spirit of a plant (such as a Kodama) or an inanimate object which may possess a soul in animistic traditions. Bakemono derived from household objects are often called "Tsukumogami". Bakemono can disguise themselves into plenty of shapes and appearances. They can be terrifying giants, but also cute household items. Sure, finding yourself in front of a Bakemono is but strange!

For instance, hitotsume-kozō appear as bald-headed children with only one eye, similar to cyclopes. They usually do no harm, like the karakasa obake, and are often depicted in a humorous way.
On the contrary, ōnyūdō (the "big monks") are surrounded by legends of both harm and kindness, while noppera-bō are faceless monsters who enjoy to frighten humans.

Today monospace fonts are often used for coding by programmers, as their strict visual rhythm can easily help them to articulate correctly the formal language of coding scripts while allowing easier spotting of mistakes. But far from their utilitarian reasons, monospace fonts also share a peculiar, quasi-brutal look, due to which they are often used for merely aesthetic reasons. Rather than being simply more readable, they convey to the reader both a simple base visual rhythm and a complex change in letterforms, forcing some letters (notably the lowercase m and w) to shrink while making thin letters like i and l gain serifs.