Elizabeth Friedlander was born in 1903 in Berlin to a rich Jewish family and she studied typography with E.R. Weiss at the Berlin Academy.
Right after school she worked for a German fashion magazine called Die Dame and in 1933 George Hartmann asked her to design a typeface for Bauersche Giesserei.
She designed Elizabeth (Roman and Kursiv and a Bold that was never completed or produced) but she was unable to name the typeface Friedlander, as she had wished, because it was a recognizably Jewish name. Her typeface was finally cut in 1939 but she had already left Germany because of the war.