Benton is credited as America's most prolific designer of metal type, having (with his team) completed 221 typefaces, including revivals of historical models, like Bodoni and Cloister; original designs, such as Hobo, Bank Gothic, and Broadway; and adding new weights to existing faces, such as Century, Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham.

[5] This allowed ATF to capitalise on a successful typeface's popularity and facilitated coherent layout and graphic design; its 1923 specimen book described its approach of creating families which could allow advertisers to "talk at command with varying emphasis and orchestral power [rather than using] a medley of display types.

[7][8] Benton was relatively retiring in life: a 1936 interview described him as "one of the most difficult men to interview I have ever talked to...try to pin some honour on him, or give him credit for some achievement, and he will modestly sidestep with the remark that ‘Lady Luck helped me a lot there!’"[1] In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Benton was a master of the technology of his day.

[9] His father, Linn Boyd Benton, invented the pantographic engraving machine, which was capable not only of scaling a single font design pattern to a variety of sizes while compensating for the size change, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design (mathematically, these are cases of affine transformation, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including PostScript).

As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall (0.11 inch) containing the entire Lord's Prayer in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000-dpi printer.