All of us type designers are reference hunters. We’re surrounded by letters, and the cover of a cheap novel, a Granjon punch or an old road sign triggers a What if… which sometimes is forgotten and sometimes turns into a typeface that may or may not resemble the original we saw days or years ago.

And we all love signs, we have a cell phone full of pictures of old shops from every single place we travel. We follow dozens of Instagram accounts that register every sign in some lost city. Sometimes, they even organise themselves so the signs don’t disappear into a landfill to make way for some soulless franchise crap.

I am from Madrid, a city that is being devoured by speculation with the applause of its mayor, who is very clear about who he works for (and it is not for the people of Madrid). Neighbours are starting to be displaced in a city designed to make easy and quick money, and old shops are closing to become illegal tourist flats that flourish as fake tabernas, CBD and cock-shaped waffle shops.

And yet, my own Madrid resists. We, the inhabitants of the Ville, somehow manage to hide from the outrages of the Court and live a parallel reality of neighbourhood shops and old taverns where we crouch until until the retirement of the owner or the greedy landlord arrives.

From this mixture of love and hate for my city, in 2024 I launched a new foundry: The Madrilenian Typographic Manufactures (MTM for short).

A never-ending project in which to clean up all the What ifs that I have kept for years, including some of Ales Santos, a fellow tavern-goer and tremendous artist.

A new foundry that plays with letters taken from the streets of Madrid, in which we tell something about their history, the place where the originals are found and where we have played with variable font technology to make them more useful (or more useless).

We design typefaces that the seasoned Madrilenian will recognise, and the foreigner will appreciate.

In 2025 I decided to merge all my work under MTM in this website, so Madrid type is now the Madriles Project. Los Madriles is a traditional way of referring to madrid in the plural form, as there are many Madrids in Madrid.

We, who live in the battered city, who prefer the walk to the algorithm and the tomato to the avocado, will continue to take care in our own way of the old letters of this insufferable city. Death to brunch, long live the Mahou Classic!