20 Years of iA
Maker’s Knowledge
Founded in 2005 as a digital design agency in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo, iA builds simple, beautiful tools that do one thing well. We believe in Maker’s Knowledge: that we only truly understand what we build yourself, 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. Helping external design teams lets us remain independent from outside investors. In return, our product business allows us to choose whom we work with.
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. In practical terms, building our tools sharpens our understanding of design—across disciplines and technologies.
From Figma to Information Architecture, Objective-C to Docker, DevOps to CSS, from Digital Branding to Social Media Marketing, from drawing to making physical books out of paper—our first-hand experience across the full spectrum of product design, product development and product management informs our design.
We Make Our Own Tools
iA designs and builds focused text 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 Notebook.
Our apps have earned multiple design awards from Apple, and this year, iA Notebook has won the prestigious Red Dot 2025 Best of the Best award, given to pioneering designs.
Design Partnerships
Our design team works with a small number of external design teams. No pitch. No tricks. We don’t work with you to upsell, oversell, or outsource your work to cheaper actors.
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 is the one that 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 comes 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 only large organizations possess. While our design team is fully booked at the moment, we make time for one-day workshops and iA Master Classes by request.
20 Years of Innovation
Staying independent may be expensive, but creative freedom is too valuable to compromise. Looking at our history shows that we’ve never followed the usual playbook. 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 and respectfully. Listening and learning from each other is how we stay human.
