iA

20 Years of Focus

Founded in 2005 in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo, iA builds simple tools that do one thing well. We believe that we only truly understand what we build ourselves, and that a joyful product can only come from the joy of creating it.

We started as a design agency and found a way to balance our products with design services. Our product business allows us to choose whom we work with—and focus on projects where our experience building focused apps can make the biggest difference.

Design Philosophy

Our work is informed by Maker’s Knowledge: The belief that we only truly understand what we’ve built with our own hands. Building our tools sharpens our understanding of design—across disciplines and technologies.

We Make Our Own Tools

While much of the industry chases investors, hype, and features, we stick to simplicity, precision, and purpose. We’ve learned that only a product built with joy becomes a product that is a joy to use.

We are best known for our focused writing app iA Writer, the innovative text-based presentation app iA Presenter, and our original, award-winning Notebook.

Our apps have earned multiple design awards from Apple. In 2025, iA Notebook won the prestigious Red Dot 2025 Best of the Best award, given to pioneering designs. In 2026, it received the iF Gold Award.

Design Partnerships

Our design team works with a small number of external teams. No pitch. No tricks. We don’t work with you to upsell, oversell, or outsource your work to cheaper vendors.

We don’t delegate the work given to us. Our experienced designers work directly with internal teams to improve performance in information architecture, typography, brand strategy, marketing communication, and UX design.

The team our partners meet does the work. Our input and our learnings remain fully confidential. No case studies. We don’t use your work to advertise. The only insights we share unfiltered come from building our own tools.

Doing both design services and our own products gives us financial independence and access to the kind of technological, financial, and market insights that usually only very large organizations possess.

20 Years of Innovation

Staying independent may not be easy, but creative freedom is too valuable to compromise. Looking at our history shows that we’ve never done what everybody does. Instead of following the pied pipers of the Internet—through the Internet of Things, the Metaverse, and Blockchain—we spent two decades building our own innovations.

iA values candid communication—internally and externally. No scripts. No routines. We say what we mean, carefully, respectfully, and with a healthy dose of humor. Listening and learning from each other is how we stay human.