[6][7][8] He developed a second career as a punchcutter, an engraver of the punches used as a master for making moulds for metal type, working on commission for printers and governments.

[12] This developed the influence of French typefounding such as the typefaces engraved by Claude Garamond with a smooth, even structure and 'e' with a level cross-stroke, by increasing the stroke width, boosting the x-height (height of lower-case letters) and reducing the length of the descenders to achieve a noticeably darker colour on the page.

[17][18][19] Monotype's development of Ehrhardt took place under the influence of executive and historian of printing Stanley Morison, not long after their successful creation of Times New Roman.

[20] It began from a recognition that the Janson designs were well-respected by fine printers of the Arts and Crafts period such as Daniel Berkeley Updike, who could print books from them using hand-set type cast from surviving original matrices owned by the Stempel company of Germany.

[18] Ehrhardt's development took place following a series of breakthroughs in printing technology which had occurred over the last fifty years without breaking from the use of metal type.

Artistically, meanwhile, the preference for using mechanical, geometric Didone letterforms introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was being displaced by a revival of interest in "old-style" serif fonts developed before this, a change that has proved to be lasting.

[30] Developed by the Monotype drawing office team in Salfords, Surrey, led by Fritz Steltzer, the project veered away from a purely faithful revival towards a denser, more condensed design.

The characters were drawn on paper in large plan diagrams by the highly experienced drawing office team, led and trained by Steltzer, who Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry.

The drawing staff who executed the design was disproportionately female and in many cases recruited from the local area and the nearby Reigate art school.

[18][40] Distinctive features of Ehrhardt include an 'A' with gently curving bar matching the centre-link of the 'B', a wide 'T' with spreadeagled serifs on either side and a 'b' with no foot on the left.

[42] Ehrhardt attracted considerable attention on its initial release; Monotype's publicity material blurbed it as "in the opinion of some authorities, the most important new book face since Times New Roman".

[43] However Ehrhardt remains considerably less well-known than many of Monotype's other classic serif designs of the interwar period, such as Times, Perpetua, Garamond or Bembo.

[31][b] Harry Carter (who with George Buday made the modern attribution to Kis) wrote that "the letters of Monotype Ehrhardt are like those of the Janson, but the appearance of a page set in it is different.

This alphabet system, intended to be used to teach children to read, used alternative characters for different sounds spelled with the same letter, like t's and c's dropped below the baseline of the text.

Matthew Butterick created a revival of Ehrhardt called Equity, whose design was inspired by his experiences of office needs from working as a lawyer.