Perpetua was commissioned at the request of Stanley Morison, an influential historian of printing and adviser to Monotype around 1925, when Gill's reputation as a leading artist-craftsman was high.

[1] Perpetua was intended as a crisp, contemporary design that did not follow any specific historic model, with a structure influenced by Gill's experience of carving lettering for monuments and memorials.

Characteristic "transitional" features in Perpetua include considerable contrast in stroke width, crisp horizontal serifs, a delicate colour on the page and a reasonably vertical axis, with letters such as 'O' having their thinnest points at the top and bottom.

"[11] Letter designs in Perpetua common in Gill's work include the 'a' that forms a sharp point without serif, the extended leg of the 'R' and the flat-topped 'A'.

[20][21][22] Morison sought Gill's talent to design a new typeface for the foundry, asking for a "roman letter suitable for book reading, which while being new, was to be of general utility and in no respect unusual.

"[23] In his memoir and assessment of Monotype's work, A Tally of Types (1953, after Gill's death), Morison claimed that he had chosen to collaborate with Gill because of a desire to create a new typeface on a pattern following no past model, and an impression that previous artistically inclined typefaces cut as niche products for the private use of fine press printing companies had been too eccentric:it still remained desirable to cut…an original face [which] required a living artist capable of the work.

There was no lack of fine calligraphers or fine printers in Britain and Germany [but] the possibility was remote of securing from this source a satisfactory set of drawings of a new roman and italic suitable for work of every sort…with the possible exceptions of the Doves and Golden Type, their efforts had been new and peculiar...[22][a] Morison wrote that he felt that Gill as a sculptor, with a trade of work more akin to the engraving process used to sculpt the master punches traditionally used to make metal type, could succeed where these designers, mostly trained in calligraphy, had not:The finely bracketed serif with which the sculptors of the roman inscriptions dignified their alphabet is symbolic; it signified their sense of the fundamental difference between private and public writing; between script and inscription.

It follows that a set of drawings of a finely serifed type by a contemporary practitioner of lettering could best be made by [a sculptor] and Gill was the obvious man to solve it.

Mosley, in an article on Perpetua's development, comments that the design's:openness and small x-height make it far from economical in use, and the delicacy - even spindliness - of its cutting are a severe handicap.

[28] Ultimately, despite Morison's high hopes for Perpetua, it has remained something of a niche face, particularly popular for high-quality printing projects and uses such as headings.

Morison late in life conceded thatthe question whether the sizes 8- to 14-point fully realise the ambition with which they were begun, i.e. to create an original type serviceable for all kinds of books, does not permit of an answer in the unqualified affirmative.

Perpetua, it may be said at once, is eminently suitable for certain kinds of books...with which a certain obvious degree of 'style' is desired, as for example, the semi-private printing with which Gill was for a long time intimately associated.

"[11][b] Vivian Ridler, some years later to become Printer to the University of Oxford, was so inspired by Gill's work around this time that he named his side printing project the Perpetua Press after the font in 1933.

Instead, he commissioned at his own expense for the punchcutter Charles Malin of Paris in 1926 to manually engrave punches which were used to cast trial metal type.

Manually cutting punches was the standard method of creating the matrices, or moulds used to cast metal type, in the previous century, but was now effectively a niche artisanal approach replaced by machine pantograph engraving.

[47][48][c] Once the Malin type had been cast, Gill found some of his decisions unsatisfying seen in extended passages of text, leading him to propose changes and corrections.

Joanna has similarities to Perpetua but a more robust colour on the page with regular slab serifs and an only slightly slanted italic; Gill described it as "a book face free from all fancy business".