After two months of reviewing your texts and presentations, we’ve reached a decision. Here are the winners of the 2025 iA Awards.
This year marks the second season of our in-house awards. Once again, we received a wide range of submissions: from poems to legal texts, video presentations to blog posts, tutorials and how-tos, biographies, educational material, and more.
During our first season, we learned that emotion, impact, and logic should guide our judgment. This year, we returned to those criteria. Each submission was reviewed carefully, and the team voted individually.
Regardless of topic or format, what mattered most when reading was the experience itself. How did this piece make us feel? Time to unveil our two winners.
Writing Award
Dustin Parker, The Future Smells Like Paper
Dustin’s piece received a unanimous vote from the team. It’s an almost perfect ode to imperfection, to the analog living alongside progress, and to the human touch.
Reality isn’t just what exists. It’s what resists.
There was no decorative formatting to sway us, no fancy fonts, no images, no framing. It arrived as raw text in the body of an email (you don’t need to be published somewhere to apply to our awards), and its impact was immediate. His writing is both careful and clear:
Spotify didn’t kill vinyl. It made people realize what vinyl offered that streaming didn’t. The crackle and pop aren’t impediments to the music. They’re proof of physical interaction, a needle tracing a groove in a specific moment in time. High-resolution photography made people fall back in love with film. Text messages made handwritten letters precious. The best technology doesn’t eliminate the analog. It clarifies what made the analog irreplaceable in the first place.
We found ourselves nodding in agreement while reading The Future Smells Like Paper. We build software, continuously refine our apps, live and work fully within the digital world. And yet, a few years ago, we felt the need to create a paper counterpart to our work: the iA Notebook. It is the handmade—and by nature imperfect—sibling of iA Writer. We love using it daily, just as we use Writer. Each serves a different purpose.
Progress isn’t about eliminating friction. It’s about eliminating the wrong friction while preserving the friction that makes us human. Print the thing you claim to care about. Sign your name in ink that bleeds a little. Send a letter that takes three days. Scribble notes on whatever paper you can find. Let objects become evidence that you meant it.
The pen still leaks. I still choose it.
You can find the full version of The Future Smells Like Paper on Dot By Dot.
Presentation Award
Audrey Tang, Democracy in the Age of AI
A few months ago, in the middle of summer, a presentation on Mastodon caught our attention. The text was in Chinese but the design was immediately familiar: the Tokyo theme from iA Presenter, supported by our Web Sharing tool.
We always enjoy seeing our apps used in the wild. When presentations are shared publicly via Sharing, we often pass them along. This one was even more encouraging than usual.
The person behind the presentation was Audrey Tang: civic technologist, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, and a global speaker many of our users already know well. After we shared the original Chinese version, AI 時代下的民主, Audrey kindly replied with a link to an English version so our community could follow along more easily.
Audrey didn’t apply for the iA Awards. Still, we couldn’t get the presentation out of our minds. So we decided to name it Best Presentation of 2025. Not because of the topic alone, but because this presentation is a lesson in storytelling.
No overload of images. No bullet-point noise. Just a clear narrative, carefully paced, with each slide doing exactly what it needs to do. Very few metaphors are used, and they stay with you all along the talk. The text is reduced to what’s essential. There’s rhythm. There’s space. There’s an emotional arc.
Many people feel that with the rapid advance of AI, our future is like a car with only a gas pedal and a brake. We can either floor it toward some unknown “Singularity” utopia, or we can slam on the brakes for fear of a dystopian future…
The ‘Following’ feed creates a ‘For Us’ reality… But ‘For You’ is different. Everyone lives in a hyper-personalized world, tailored just for them…
The AI behind it is a parasitic AI. Its sole purpose is to learn what keeps you addicted and glues you to the screen…
So-called ‘social networks’ have largely become an infrastructure for outrage.
We flipped the incentive for ‘going viral.’ Instead of rewarding the most extreme statements, we rewarded the statements that built the most consensus…
The bigger challenge is the horizontal problem: ensuring a world full of different humans and AIs can cooperate peacefully…
Authoritarianism is a pyramid. Democracy must be a network…
A decentralized, symbiotic architecture is our defense…
In Silicon Valley, you often hear the phrase, ‘Singularity is Near.’ But I’m here to tell you: ‘Plurality is Here.’
The future is not singular; it is plural.
It’s not a slide deck trying to replace a speaker. It’s a presentation designed to support a strong message. This is what we’ve argued for over the years, taken to an extreme: slides should serve the story, not compete with it.
So even if this comes as a surprise: Congratulations, Audrey, and thank you for letting us share your work with our community. You can find below both versions of the presentation:
- Democracy in the Age of AI, the English version
- The original one in Chinese: AI 時代下的民主
See You Next Year
Once again, reading through our users’ work was both a pleasure and an honor. We’re grateful for your submissions and for all the feedback many of you share with us throughout the year, whether by email or on social media. Hearing from you, in all its forms, is a constant reminder of why we do what we do.
Thanks to Web Sharing for Presenter, seeing presentations here and there on social media with a wide range of authors and topics makes us incredibly proud. It also made us realize something: next year, the iA Awards shouldn’t only be about personal submissions. They should also be about recognition: pointing to work we encounter and feel deserves to be seen.
The next edition is already on the horizon. If you haven’t applied in the past two years, consider this an invitation. If you know someone worth to shine a light on, this will be your chance to nominate them. And to those who have been with us from the beginning: thank you. We appreciate your continued trust and curiosity, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll bring in 2026.
