How Alan Madić launched Edito Type alongside his design practice

The Brand Identity: Edito launched in December 2025 as an independent Paris-based type foundry, though the work behind it predates the launch by several years. Alan Madic didn’t come to type design through the conventional route. He started drawing letters out of necessity, building the type his work as a designer kept asking for. That practice-led origin runs through everything Edito now creates. The catalogue leans into display territory, treating typography as visual material with rhythm, scale and presence.

References tend to come from the second half of the 20th century, drawing on alternative editorial design, modernist languages and figures like Willy Fleckhaus. In this conversation, Madic discusses the foundry’s editorial approach, the release of Initiale with Clara Dousson, and the working balance between bespoke commissions and retail typefaces. Edito website Sirca in use for Epoch IV Pompeii TBI Hey Alan, how are things? AM Things are going well, thanks. Summer is arriving in Paris, and there’s currently a move into new studio spaces happening in the background.

Edito launched six months ago, and everything has been moving very quickly since then. TBI Edito has launched as an extension of your wider practice in art direction and design. What prompted the shift from using typography in your work to publishing it as a foundry? AM Launching Edito came from a desire to build an independent structure dedicated to type design and typography alongside my wider design practice. Creating a dedicated framework for the foundry gave that research a clearer continuity, while also allowing me to explore creative territories I probably wouldn’t have approached as easily under my own name alone.

It gave the work a more coherent space to develop, rather than existing only through individual projects. Over time, some of these typefaces started to exist beyond the projects they were initially designed for, whether they emerged through commissioned projects or more personal explorations. Katalog and Sirca I didn’t study type design. I started learning it out of necessity. I didn’t study type design. I started learning it out of necessity. TBI You came to type design from a design and art direction background. How has that route shaped your approach? AM I didn’t study type design.

I started learning it out of necessity, because I wanted access to typefaces that precisely matched the visual language and sensibility I was looking for as a designer and art director. Typography progressively became central to my practice through an ongoing search for precision, reduction and essential forms within my work. A key idea behind the foundry is that the typefaces are conceived through an active design practice rather than from a purely typographic standpoint. Most of the typefaces emerged from situations where I felt something was missing, or from forms I repeatedly found myself looking for.

The catalogue was never constructed around a particular commercial strategy. It developed more intuitively through practical needs, project work and ongoing use. I think coming from a graphic design background inevitably shapes the catalogue as a whole. Even if the releases vary formally, they tend to move within a shared aesthetic and relationship to image-making. There’s probably as much attention placed on the formal quality of the drawings as on how the typefaces behave once they enter broader visual systems. Katalog Arch TBI Edito positions itself as both a distribution platform and a research space.

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The launch of Edito Type represents a significant development in the type design industry, combining design practice with type distribution, which is particularly relevant for brand strategy professionals focused on typography's role in branding.