His strong aesthetic sense was a force within the company, which starting shortly before his joining became increasingly known for commissioning popular, historically influenced designs that revived some of the best typefaces of the past, with particular attention to the middle period of printing from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, and creating and licensing several new type designs that would become popular.

[13] Stanley Morison was born on 6 May 1889, at Wanstead, Essex, but spent most of his childhood and early adult years (1896–1912) in London at the family home in Fairfax Road, Harringay.

[20][21] At Monotype, Morison obtained rights to typefaces by leading artists of the time including Bruce Rogers, Jan van Krimpen and Berthold Wolpe.

[22] Aesthetically, Morison disliked the excessive historicity of Victorian romantic fine printing, with its interest in reviving blackletter and the appearance of medieval manuscripts, but preferred a more restrained style of printing that nonetheless also rejected the harshly industrial appearance of the "batteries of bold, bad faces" of the nineteenth century.

[23][4] In 1927, the British Monotype Corporation hired Beatrice Warde – quickly named the company's Publicity Manager – and has been credited with spreading Morison's typographic influences through her own writings.

[31] Late in life, for Crutchley he wrote the book A Tally of Types, an assessment of the typefaces created by Monotype that were used in Cambridge.

[30] As a writer for the Fleuron he was known for promoting the radical idea that italics in book printing were too disruptive to the flow of text, and should be phased out.

[33][34] While this influenced some contemporary type designers such as van Krimpen and Dwiggins at Linotype, Morison rapidly came to concede that the idea was misguided, and late in life commented that Times New Roman included an italic that "owed more to Didot than dogma.

[38][39][40] Times New Roman, the typeface which Morison developed with graphic artist Victor Lardent, was first used by the newspaper in 1932 and was issued commercially by Monotype in 1933.