He and Walker designed an outstanding type, which was based on the roman type of the 15th-century printer Nicolas Jenson.
He designed the Montaigne typeface in 1901 and the Centaur in 1915, both inspired by Nicolas Jenson's roman type of 1470, and he also designed Riverside Caslon.
It is notable that Jenson never used his roman type for the printing of ecclesiastical or legal works—for which various versions of black letter were to remain standard.
The layout combined exquisitely light woodcuts by an anonymous illustrator with roman types by Griffo utilizing new, smaller capitals; Griffo cut these types after careful study of Roman inscriptions.
Along with the tin mines and Cornish moors, she lights upon her grandmother's house in Suffolk, flint weapons, jaw-bones found in Chinese caves, Roman occupation, types of Cornish fishing boat, grief, graves and wildflowers, among much else.
The Rhineland, however, became one of the great glassmaking areas of the Roman world (partly, it is thought, because of successive migrations of Near Eastern workers) and, although Rhenish glass is always recognizably Roman, several types of decorated glass were specialities of the district.
The first Renaissance monument of a specifically Roman type, it influenced the work of Isaia da Pisa and later Roman sculptors of the 15th century.
In his Book of Hours (1531), he framed columns of roman type with modular borders; these exuberant forms were a perfect complement to his illustrations.
Important influences in effecting the almost exclusive use of roman type were the printers Simon de Colines, Henri and Robert Estienne, Geoffroy Tory, and the man who was the world's first commercial typefounder, Claude Garamond.
Their preference for roman type greatly helped the eventual defeat of black-letter, or Gothic, type.
