 He worked under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, and many of his designs are old-style serif designs inspired by the relatively organic structure of typefaces created between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, following the lead of earlier revivalist printers such as William Morris.Eric Sloane, who was his neighbour as a boy, recalled that he also took inspiration from hand-painted signs.He also developed a number of typefaces influenced by blackletter medieval manuscripts, illuminated manuscript capitals and Roman square capitals carved into stone.