Goudy was the third most prolific designer of
metal type in the United States (behind
Morris Fuller Benton and
R. Hunter Middleton), with ninety faces actually cut and cast, and many more designs completed. His most famous were
Copperplate Gothic and
Goudy Old Style. Besides printing, he also worked on numerous hand-lettering projects (especially early in his career) and created a large set of
ampersands for an article on the topic. Goudy's career was influenced by the
Arts and Crafts movement and the growth of fine book printing in the United States. At a time when printing types had become quite mechanical and geometric under the influence of
Didone designs such as
Bodoni, Goudy spent his career developing old-style serifs often influenced by the printing of the Italian Renaissance and calligraphy, with a characteristic warmth and irregularity. His neighbour,
Eric Sloane, recalled that he also took inspiration from
hand-painted signs. In contrast to his great contemporary
Morris Fuller Benton, he generally avoided
sans-serif designs, though he did create the nearly sans-serif
Copperplate Gothic, inspired by engraved letters, early in his career and a few others later. As a result, many of his designs may look quite similar to modern readers. He also developed a number of typefaces influenced by
blackletter medieval manuscripts,
illuminated manuscript capitals and Roman capitals engraved in stone. Some of his most famous designs such as Copperplate Gothic and Goudy Stout are unusual deviations from his normal style. His sans-serif series,
Goudy Sans, adopts an eccentric
humanist style with a calligraphic italic. Quite unlike most sans-serif types of the period, it was unpopular in his lifetime but revived several times since. As an independent artist and consultant, Goudy needed to undertake a large range of commissions to survive, and sought patronage from companies who would commission a typeface for their own printing and advertising. This led to him producing a large range of designs on commission, and promoting his career through talks and teaching. As a result, many of his designs may look quite similar to modern readers. His career was aided by the new
pantograph engraving technology, which made it easier to rapidly cut the
matrices used as moulds to form metal type. This was a considerable advance on the traditional method of
cutting punches manually at the size of the letter to be printed, which would be stamped into metal to form the matrix. An additional boon to his career was the new
hot metal typesetting technology of the period which created increasing availability and demand for new fonts. While most of his designs are 'old-style' serif faces, they do still explore a wide range of aspects of the genre, with
Deepdene offering a strikingly upright italic, Goudy Modern merging traditional old-style letters with the insistent, horizontal serifs of
Didone faces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Goudy Old Style being sold with a swash italic for display use. Goudy kept records of his work (though most of these do not survive due to the fire), giving his typefaces numbers for his own use in a similar way to the
opus numbers used by composers. Almost uniquely for type designers of the metal type era, he wrote extensively on his work, including a thorough commentary on each of his designs late in life. The printer
Daniel Berkeley Updike, while respecting some of his work (at least publicly), echoed Goudy's student
Dwiggins' comment that his work lacked 'a certain snap and acidity', and apparently somewhat snobbishly disliked Goudy's aggressive seeking after work and reputation. He also wrote that Goudy had "never gotten over" a desire to imitate medieval books. The British printer
Stanley Morison, also a veteran of fine book printing whose career at
Monotype had moved in the direction of blending tradition with practicality, admired much of Goudy's work and ethos but also wrote sarcastically in private letters to Updike that Goudy had "designed a whole century of very peculiar looking types", and that he was glad that his company's
Times New Roman did not look "as if it has been designed by somebody in particular – Mr. Goudy for instance." Goudy felt in his later life that his career had been overshadowed by new trends, with modernism and a trend towards sharper
geometric design making his work out of favor.
Walter Tracy described Goudy as "over-fond" of the 'e' with a tilted centre common in fifteenth-century printing which he felt added an "unwanted restlessness" to many of his type designs. and Berkeley Old Style Medium. In 1938 he designed
University of California Old Style, for the sole proprietary use of the
University of California Press. The
Lanston Monotype Company released a version of this typeface as
Californian for wider distribution in 1956, while
ITC created a well-known adaptation (and expansion) called Berkeley Old Style or ITC Berkeley, in 1983. William T. LaMoy, a curator at
Syracuse University, discovered two sets of matrices (metal molds) and associated paperwork in Syracuse University Library's archives for a font known as Sherman, which the publisher Frederic Fairchild Sherman had commissioned from Goudy in 1910. LaMoy published an article about this discovery in 2013, explaining how, in the 1960s, Sherman's niece bequeathed the font to Syracuse University because she was aware of Goudy's connection to the university. Indeed, in 1934, Syracuse University had awarded Goudy an honorary degree and, from the journalism school, a typographic medal for excellence. Recently Syracuse University adopted and digitized the Sherman typeface and is now using it for official publications. Called the Sherman Serif Book, it is a proprietary font for Syracuse University. == Legacy ==