Design

Maker’s Knowledge

To know bread, you need to make bread

Design

Tokyo Focus Tracks

Soothing typographic train rides for chilled writing

Notebook

iA Wins Red Dot Best of Best

The highest distinction for pioneering designs

Writer

Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish

Like moss on a star destroyer

Writer

Simple, Slick & Smooth

The all new iA Writer for Windows

Writer

Screenwriting Challenge

iA sponsors NYC Midnight 2025

Presenter

How to Master iA Presenter

Tutorials, videos, and tips for story telling

Community

Unveiling the 2024 iA Award

And the winners are…

Community

Which Story Will Win?

The NYC Midnight 2025 Short Story Challenge

Branding

New Year Recap 2024

Looking back before we look forward to the next year

Presenter

Slowly Melting Eye Candy

The screen saver you always wanted

Presenter

Share Your Presentation in a Single Click

Send the link—no login, no pinching, no squinting

Writer

A Chess Template for iA Writer

Celebrating the 2024 FIDE World Championship

Writer

iA Writer for Windows 2.0

In public beta, coming soon

Design

New Wallpapers

For your phone, tablet or desktop computer

Community

iA Winterfest 2024

A gift, every week, until Christmas

Community

The 2024 iA Awards

Share your best work and win an iA Notebook

Writer

How to Master iA Writer

Tutorials, Tips, and Tricks

Notebook

The Second Notebook Batch

Not sure what to get your friends for Christmas?

Writing

On Writing Setups And Staying Motivated

The iA guide to writing your first novel, Part IV

Writing

Story Outline and Research

The iA guide to writing your first novel, Part III

Writing

Memorable Characters and Unique Worlds

The iA guide to writing your first novel, Part II

Writing

The Driving Question, and Your Daily Routine

The iA guide to writing your first novel, Part I

Writer

Stay in control of Apple’s AI Writing Tools

iA Writer highlights the additions made by Apple’s AI

Presenter

The Five Canons of Rhetoric

Create, structure, design, prepare—the rest is easy

Writer

Our Android App is Frozen in Carbonite

After seven years of trying, we need to change course on our adventure in the Android galaxy.

Presenter

Your speaking voice

Notes on how to cultivate your speaking voice, by Grenville Kleiser.

Writer

Faster Filing With Tree View: A Step Forward for Large Writing Projects

With tree view, organizing large files in iA Writer just became a lot easier.

Design

Making Icons Fresh

iA Writer and iA Presenter have new icons. We’d like to share the thought and work we put into it, so you see the full picture.

Presenter

Add Images Fast With Unsplash

You can now add high-quality pictures directly within iA Presenter.

Writer

Summer Reading: August Edition

Five more books to help you improve your writing, presenting, and design skills.

Tips

The Art of Screenwriting

Script doctors are the forgotten wizards behind every good film. We interviewed one.

Writing

How to Build Worlds—and Why

Building worlds is a wonderful inspiration to write and a rewarding pastime in itself.

Branding

iA‎‎‎lice

On 4 July Americans will celebrate Independence Day. And so they should, as gloomy days may lie ahead. But did you know that 4 July is also Alice Day?

Writer

Summer Reading: July Edition

Looking for reading suggestions for this summer? Check our selection of books about writing, presenting and design.

Writer

Why write?

Writing is part of lifelong learning process that keeps us awake, sharp and connected.

Writing

Turning the Tables on AI

AI is sold to make us think less… How about using AI not to think less but *more*?

Presenter

Finding confidence

Many of us experience a paralyzing dread of speaking in front of an audience, and will do just about anything to avoid it. But practice makes perfect.

Design

Design as Thought: AI and the Future of Design

Orlando and Oliver studied philosophy together 30 years ago. Their shared love for philosophy, design, and technology reunited them to discuss AI and the future.

Presenter

Behind the gesture

Should you use gestures while you’re presenting? What about facial expressions? Find out here.

Technology and Web Trends

I Want You Back (The Dropbox Remix)

Dropbox finally has a native Files app integration. This is good news for iA Writer.

Branding

No Thanks

Last week, Apple got into trouble because of an ad. It taught us a lesson beyond the good and evil of advertising and public relations.

Presenter

Sharing Presentations Made Easy

Online sharing is now available in iA Presenter beta for Mac.

Design

A good image tells a good story

Choose visuals as carefully as words to quickly grab attention, explain complex ideas, and leave a lasting impact.

Design

AI and the Beauty of Human Flaws

The Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger interviewed Oliver Reichenstein, founder of iA, on the Aesthetics of AI.

Notebook

iA Notebook Preorders

Following the enthusiastic response to our announcement in December, we are pleased to open preorders for the handcrafted iA Notebook.

Writer

All-New Shortcuts: iA Writer 7.1

With 18 built-in actions and 22 ready-made shortcuts, iA Writer 7.1 saves time and helps you focus on writing by avoiding repetitive busywork.

Presenter

Successful methods of public speaking

Selected extracts from Grenville Kleiser’s Successful Methods of Public Speaking (1920).

Design

AI Videos: ******* Psychotic

Remember when you saw the first DALL-E and ChatGPT-texts? How do you feel about them now? Could the same thing happen to AI videos?

Presenter

Improved Image Handling: iA Presenter 1.2

Jam-packed update preceding iA Presenter’s first anniversary, primarily centered around image handling.

Writer

NYC Midnight: Screenwriting Challenge

iA is once again proud to partner with NYC Midnight as a title sponsor for their international 2024 Screen Writing Challenge.

Design

AI Art is The New Stock Image

Critique of the pure AI image.

Design

Is Every Picture Worth 1,000 Words?

Critique of the pure stock image.

Community

NYC Midnight: Short Story Challenge

We are sponsoring the NYC Midnight 2024 Short Story Challenge. This marks our continued partnership with the prestigious literary event.

Presenter

Finishing your speech

An extract from Clarence Stratton’s Public Speaking (1920) that explains why a strong conclusion is critical for your presentation.

Information Architects

New Year Recap

2023 marked a significant chapter for iA Inc. The iA family grew from a single app to three distinct products: iA Writer, iA Presenter, and iA Notebook.

Presenter

iA Presenter Beta for iPad and iPhone

As the final gift of this year’s Winterfest, we want to let you in on a secret. We have been working on iA Presenter for iPad and iPhone.

Tips

iA Markdown Dictionary

Need to quickly recall or learn Markdown syntax? The Markdown Dictionary is here to help. It’s a standard macOS dictionary built for the Dictionary app.

Writer

The iA Writer Template for Screenwriters

If you know markdown, you’ll get the basics in ten Minutes. And then off you go, typing away on your screenplay.

Notebook

iA Writer in Paper

It all began with a simple question: What if iA Writer took the form of a physical notebook?

Writer

iA Writer 7: Whoa, Feedback!

We needed to make sure that everyone understood what we do and, especially, do not do. How did it go?

Design

iA Winterfest 2023

iA Inc is getting into the holiday spirit by donning its Santa Claus outfit this December. Enter our raffle for a chance to get one of the first iA Notebooks!

Writer

iA Writer 7

iA Writer dims the text you paste from AI tools. As you edit ChatGPT’s input and make it your own, iA Writer keeps track of what is yours and what isn’t.

Writer

Writing with AI

When ChatGPT came out one year ago, we wanted to know whether and how it could be used for writing. We put it to the test.

Writer

No AI Feature

After a year of observation, experimentation, and testing, we may have found a careful response to the challenges we face with AI.

Design

Copycats &  Other Monsters

Things can be replaced. Lost time, however, is forever lost.

Writing

Daily Writing Habit: Emergency Kit

We’ve put together five hacks for creative writing to get your hands back on the keyboard. So, fire up iA Writer and get ready to embark on your writing adventure, once more.

Design

Writing by Numbers

Starting to write can feel like sucking on a lemon. Here’s a simple way to plan, start and guide your writing: Use numbers to control your journey.

Design

Unraveling the Digital Markets Act

To comprehend the DMA’s relevance to us as an independent software company, we read and analyzed it from beginning to end.

Design

Launch Day

The first time you heard the word “launch” you may not have known what it meant. But likely, you quickly understood that launch day is like test day in school.

Presenter

Presentation Tips

How to tell your story without boring your audience to death.

Presenter

iA Presenter Early Preview

It’s time to mark a milestone – iA Presenter officially launches on June 1st. With PowerPoint export.

Presenter

Presenter Pricing (II)

How many Big Macs for an app?

Design

AI and the End of Writing

Soon, we won’t need to write much any longer. Artificial Intelligence will do it for us.

Presenter

Ho Ho Ho

A letter template for iA Writer and a theme builder for iA Presenter.

Presenter

Theme Builder for iA Presenter

Build your own custom theme for iA Presenter, the next-generation presentation tool for macOS.

Design

Design Takes Time

Designing iA Presenter took us three years. Design takes time.

Presenter

Presenter Pricing (I)

We could just ask you how much you would pay for iA Presenter. You’d probably want the lowest possible price.

Presenter

Introducing iA Presenter, the story-based presentation app

iA Presenter’s text-based interface cuts creation time to a minimum. Find out how presenting can be fun again, like Karaoke.

Design

Designing with Emoji

Emoji spread from text messages into everything we write. Headlines, list items, email subject lines… Your text is boring? Add an emoji! Trying to increase the response to your newsletter? Add an emoji! Making a list? Add an emoji! Adding emoji always works. Right?

Presenter

How Can We Make Presentations Better?

You need two things: A good story, and a new type of presentation app.

Presenter

Being Boring: What’s Wrong With PowerPoint?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Could a better presentation tool change the culture of never-ending boredom?

Writer

iA Writer 6: Now with Lasers

In 2010, the original iA Writer introduced focused writing with Markdown. Twelve years later, iA Writer opens the doors to a simple and friendly knowledge management system with wikilinks.

Writing

End Procrastination

The most influential companies in the world put all their energy into getting us to click, react, and consume. If you work on a computer, procrastination awaits you everywhere, all the time. How do you beat it and get things done?

Design

On Apps and Coffee

No matter how many times developers compare their apps to coffee… apps are not coffee. The question is not: How many coffees does an app cost. It’s: How many apps does a cup of coffee cost? And the answer is: Apps are not coffee but coffee machines.

Writing

Markdown in Academic Writing

Academic writing should be “clear, concise, focused, structured, and backed by evidence.” Markdown and iA Writer are a winning combination for achieving this.

Writer

After all, everyone is distracted once in a while

Staying focused is tough for many, especially those with ADHD. Let’s see how iA Writer helps address the challenges of distractions and focus.

Writer

Style Check on Android

After its launch on Mac and iOS last summer and its recent introduction to Windows, Style Check has arrived on Android with version 2.1 of iA Writer. It has been one of our best received and most requested features, therefore we worked hard to make it available for all platforms.

Writer

An ADHD-friendly Writing App

There is a ton of specialist advice out there regarding writing for high school and university students with ADHD. Most of these suggest a distraction-free writing environment that allows for channeling one’s energy into the task at hand.

Writer

Style Check on Windows, Big Sur Support, and Next Steps for Android

iA Writer for Windows 1.4 is now available and it brings Style Check in a free update. We launched Style Check on Mac and iOS this past summer and we have never received so much praise for a new feature. You sent us request after request to bring it to other platforms. We doubled our efforts to bring it to other platforms as soon as possible. It’s ready for Windows as of today. We are working on bringing it to Android next.

Digital Strategy and Design

Apple cuts 30% commission to 15% for small developers

Apple will lower its commission to 15% if you make under one million US dollars per year. For small developers, this is fantastic news and overall it’s a good step in the right direction. In the bigger picture, more steps need to follow.

Digital Strategy and Design

Why is Facebook not Paying the Apple Tax?

Why should Facebook—the biggest beneficiary of the iPhone, its tools, and its infrastructure—pay nothing, when small developers have to pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Digital Strategy and Design

How to Think Different

This week we published two long posts on Monopolies, the Apple Tax, and Subscriptions. Both articles come to the conclusion that lowering the 30% fee Apple charges developers would benefit everyone. The tax is at the core of their Antitrust case, at the core of the developer’s business model. And in the end, it is in our common customer’s interest to lower it, because profitable development produces better software.

Digital Strategy and Design

Subscription or no subscription? That is not the question.

Companies selling apps via subscriptions use drama to sell: “Either subscription or we die.”

Digital Strategy and Design

On Monopolies, Apple, and Epic

Google has built a complete monopoly on search. Amazon uses the sales data of its resellers to continuously expand and solidify market dominance. Facebook copies the competitors that they can’t bully into being bought to keep their dominant market position. Apple is partying in antitrust land forcing its competitors to hand out 30% of its revenue. The game is rigged. And no one is enforcing the rules. Except for Epic, the maker of one of the most successful games of all time.

Writer

The Power of Style Check

Style Check is like having a personal editor-in-chief on your device, carefully reviewing your text for redundancies, clichés and filler words as you type. It’s simple, different, powerful, and available for Mac, iOS, Windows and Android.

Writer

Syntax Control, Individual Scroll, Snippets

iA Writer for Windows 1.3 is the biggest update the platform has ever seen. It’s available to download right now and comes as a free update for existing users.

Writer Tutorials

New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing

iA Writer 5.5 for Mac and iOS has arrived. The update adds a powerful mix of functionality and delicate subtlety that will improve your writing workflow.

Writer

MacStories App Of The Year and Custom Backup

2019 was a good year for iA Writer. Sales were good, reviews were good and in the end we got rewarded for our work with the App of the year prize from MacStories.

Writer

PDF Preview, New Typography, Preferences

You’ve waited patiently for it, and now it is here. Version 1.2 of iA Writer for Windows has launched. This release packs in a boatload of improvements, making it the biggest update to hit the platform since the initial release.

Writer

Multi-window, Dark Mode, Content Block Flexibility

iA Writer 5.3 is ready for iOS13. It now comes with multi-window support, Dark Mode, and Content Block improvements.

Design

Useful macOS Tricks

People sometimes ask us “What tricks do you designer guys use on your Macs that I don’t know of?” We don’t know what you don’t know, but there are a couple of general tricks using macOS that you might not all be familiar with.

Information Architects

The Nice Place

It seems the times of free online advertising for indies are over. Blogs are not what they used to be, RSS is about to be buried. Facebook is a commercial and moral nightmare, and so is Facebook’s Instagram. On Twitter, our main marketing channel since 2007, our engagement is sinking year after year. On Google, VC powered startups steal our ad positions, and we’re all too old for Snapchat or TikTok. So what can you do in 2019 to get the word out?

Writing

Music in Writing

Being fully immersed in writing is like composing and playing music while we drum up our perceptions into letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. How does it all play together?

Writer

New File Library for Windows

iA Writer for Windows came out one year ago. We launched version 2 and called it 1.1. It comes with a cleaner UI, sweeter typography, tighter templates, better word export, and a powerful file library. At first sight, it just looks like we’ve closed a gap to its older sibling, the Mac app. But there is a subtle twist

Technology and Web Trends

Ethics for Designers

Facebook fishing for our email passwords, Roomba is hovering up all the data on our homes, Amazon is listening to our conversations for laughs, Tik-Tok spying on our kids. And that we see so much dirt on the surface makes it likely that under the surface it’s even worse. The solution for all of this: “Ethics”. Design ethics! Tech ethics! Business ethics! Ethics for AI!

Writer

Word and GitHub

iA Writer 5.2 offers premium Microsoft Word export for markdown and lays the ground for a great iOS GitHub synchronization.

Writer

Writing Fonts: A Typographic Christmas

The next update of iA Writer does some extreme typographic acrobacy. It comes with three variable fonts which give us 1000s of grades. This allows us to adjust the weight of the font depending on size, device and background color. Additionally, we adjust the line height and spacing depending on column width and type size. The crazy part is that you probably won’t see any of this. But you might feel it.

Writing

Write to Organize

Creating the latest update to iA Writer was a slow burn. Beginning with some basic maintenance and then improvements for the new iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, the Kraken was released in the final weeks of preparation. The all new Tags and x-callback-urls are so hip they’ll take you to funky town.

Digital Strategy and Design

Ethics and Aesthetics

As the success of design has become measurable, it has transformed a handicraft into an engineering job. Not the master designer but the user is the arbitrator of good design. The key performance indicator is not beauty but profit. As financial and technical performance was gained, beauty left the stage. Now it feels like something is missing.

Design

Designed in China, Assembled in California

As China starts outdoing us economically, technically and strategically, we are turning Chinese, slowly losing the spiritual, cultural and political texture that made us different.

Writer

Hokusai Desktop Backgrounds

Both iA Writer for Mac and iOS are localized in English, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. For this update, we’ve decided to add a little present: 17 beautiful wallpapers for your desktop, mobile phone, or tablets.

Writer

A New Document Library

iA Writer for Mac, version 5.0, is now available for download in the Mac App Store. It comes with a brand new document library, and apart from English, German and Japanese, it now also speaks French, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and Portuguese.

📄

Writing

Politics and the English Language

An essay by George Orwell that advocates simplicity and precision in writing for clearer thinking and honest communication.

Writing

The Elements of Style

A timeless guide to clear and effective writing that still influences authors today. Written by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

Writing

Good Writing is Good Thinking

Great writing is more about thoughtful reflection than following rules. Karl Philipp Moritz encourages writers to find and develop their own unique style.

Writing

Using Parts of Speech to Improve Your Writing

Discover iA Writer’s Syntax Highlight tool, which gives you a more structured view of your text and improves your writing style.

Writer

Writer vs Word

Microsoft Word is the classic do-all text editor used by… just about everyone. How does it compare to a modern, focused writing app like iA Writer?

Writer

Mac with Tabs

This update to iA Writer brings support for tabs in macOS High Sierra. Version 4.2 also comes with a subtle UI polish in typography and transitions, all in preparation for the big 5.0 upgrade.

MAC

Design

Take the Power Back

You may have heard that the best way to deal with the “information overload” is to switch off your devices. To take a break from the Internet. Go for a run. Roll out the Yoga mat. Read a book. Talk to your friends. Switching off is good advice. But eventually, you’ll be back. How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link. Take the power back.

Writer

iOS: Backups for Dropbox, Google Drive and Co.

iA Writer 5.0.5 for iOS introduces a fail-safe backup system for any documents opened from other applications. This means if you’ve opened a file from Dropbox, Google Drive or any other storage provider, everything you write in iA Writer is preserved—no matter what.

GOOGLE CAUSE

Design

Computer Poetry

Every time we read a computer-generated text, part of our life gets sucked into a little black electric hole.

Design

Make Bots Identifiable

Everybody that has an interest in influencing public opinion will happily pay a handful of Dollars to amplify their voices. Governments, political groups, corporations, traders, and just simple plain trolls will continue to shout through bot armies—as long as it is so cheap.

Digital Strategy and Design

How does sending traffic to the App Store affect your App Store ranking?

Sending too much traffic too the App Stores might negatively impact your App Store ranking.

✔ ⛖ SHOP 👊 SHOP

Design

Is Time Money?

Bitcoin rose from 1,000 to 19,000 in a couple of months. Today it fell back to 10,000. If time is money, then what happened to people’s time? Is it lost?

Design

Design is Political

Everything around us is designed. Design shapes cities, gives form to houses, sketches and connects spaces; designers define our environment, our things, bodies and minds. Design is political.

Design

Web Trend Map 2018

The most important ingredient for a Web Trend Map is missing: The Web. Time to bring some of it back.

Design

News from Facebook

Step by step, Facebook has cut the news from its feeds. Yesterday, they confirmed that they will focus on content from friends and family while de-emphasizing news. How come? A brief history of the odd partnership between Facebook and the news industry and what it means for us.

Design

Why we like distractions

Just when it really matters and we should really do what we are about to do we are most vulnerable to distractions. How come? And what can we do about it?

Writer

Kickstarted: iA Writer for Windows

iA Writer for Windows has been a long time coming. Ever since we first launched iA Writer for Mac you have asked, “Will you make a Windows version?” After over two Million downloads on iOS, Mac and Android, we’re excited to bring iA Writer to the world’s largest desktop platform. And to fulfill the vision we have for this app, we’ve just launched our first-ever Kickstarter campaign.

WRITE WINDOWS

Design

The Ideal Paragraph

You may have read or heard that the ideal paragraph consists of one thought. Clearly, there are various ways to begin and end a thought. One way is to start with a claim or topic sentence, offer examples for your claim, explain how your examples support the claim, repeat the claim in the light of the examples, and build a bridge to the next thought. It is not clear if the ideal paragraph has five, six, seven, a maximum or a minimum number of sentences, as it is not clear what one thought is, where or how it begins, and where or how it ends. On second thought, one could as well argue that every sentence consists of one thought.

Design

Who serves whom?

Artificial Intelligence is a complex riddle for all sorts of experts. It’s full of magic, mystery, money, mind-boggling techno-ethical paradoxes and sci-fi dilemmas that may or may not affect us in some far or near future. Meanwhile, it already shapes our everyday life. Things already go wrong. And no one is responsible. What can we do?

SERVICE

Design

“Art at scale”

The excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails are a gold mine. The text itself is a raw cut-up from a series of private emails. Kay argues that fundamental innovation and following objectives run counter to each other. Very much like art, fundamental research needs to be free from objective purpose.

Writer

Boom! Boom! Boom!

In 2017, we gave you a major iOS rewrite, the complete redesign of Android and a new type of writing font. 2018 is going to be a big year for iA Writer. There is an upcoming update of the Mac library and a backup solution for iOS is under construction. Next, we’ll add a Windows version, web collaboration and a physical product to the family. What? When? How?

Design

Duospace: In Search of the Perfect Writing Font

Monospace is the typical choice that communicates writing. With iA Writer Duospace, we went a step ahead. After seven years of offering no font options to write, iA Writer now comes with a choice. Next to the monospace Nitti you will now find a brand new duospace font. Duospace?

Writer

95% Keyboard: iA Writer 5

10 months in the making, we built iA Writer 5 following three specific goals. Through the 10 months of iterations, training our focus on these objectives has kept us on track. So what did we choose as our guiding principles?

WRITE ⚄

Writer

Files in iOS11

This fall Apple brought us iOS11 and with it new features. A lot of you have asked about the new Files app integration in iA Writer 5. Here is a short look at what you can expect.

Writer

iA Writer for Android Oreo

The new iA Writer for Android now works on 42,000 different phones and tablets. Different brands, different resolutions, different processors, screens… Here is how it looks.

Writer

iA Writer 5 for iPad: Sneak Peek

You may have already seen our sneak peek of iA Writer 5 on iPhone. For those of you with iPads, you may be wondering what the tablet experience will be like. This is what you can expect.

Writer

iA Writer 5 for iPhone: Sneak Peek

iA Writer 5 will be released on iOS shortly. You asked for more focus on the writing, so we directed our attention on the keyboard, the heart of your writing experience.

Writing

Want to write? Here is how to get started

“Only write when you have something to say.” It’s short and sound advice. But, how do we know if we have something to say?

Writer

iA Writer 5: Forging the Hammer

Last week we explained how we believe that technology evolves from raw to complex to simple and how this relates to iA Writer. In order to simplify it even more, we asked how you see iA Writer in future—and what and how you’d expect to pay for it. To a handful of questions we received a warm wave of response from you. You all agreed on on thing: Let’s keep it simple.

Writer

iA Writer 5: From Raw to Cooked to Sushi

Technology evolves from raw to complex to simple. From the fist to the hand axe to the hammer. From carts to the Model T to Tesla. From switchboard-operated phones to digital phones to smartphones. From SMS to Facebook to Messenger. From the crude to the cooked to Sushi.

Writer

iA Writer 4

We’ve been hard at work producing the next major update to iA Writer, and we’re happy to announce its arrival. iA Writer 4 adds a whole new dimension to how you can work with your documents. We’re excited—and a little nervous—to unveil how this all works…

Design

UX Lessons In Game Design

To spice up our monster essay on icons, we created an icon monster shooter arcade game. Planned as a one week hackathon, it turned into an amazing one year adventure. Here is what UX designers learned creating an arcade game.

Design

Multichannel Text Processing: The Benefits of Using Markdown

In the classic era of word processing, text was born between MS Word and a printer. Today, it is written and edited on multiple devices and apps, then mailed, printed, copied, pasted, annotated, published, RSSed, shared and re-shared, using all kinds of tools and platforms. Stubborn proprietary file formats fail in this frantic new environment. Plain text does better, but lacks Rich Text’s formatting. Markdown could be our golden gun. If only it looked a little shinier!

Design

On Icons

Icons save space. Icons look crisp. Icons give quick answers to hard questions: How do we make it nicer? How can we brand it? How do we make it more fun? We ♥ icons. Until they start messing with our minds.

Writer Tutorials

iA Writer Video Tutorials

To help you get the most out of iA Writer, we’ve created several videos. Here you can find tips and tricks which make producing beautiful content easy as pie.

Writer

iA Writer Comes in Colors

In 2013, iA Writer introduced Syntax Control: syntactic highlighting as an editing feature. We kept it minimal: only one part of speech at a time, in blue. With version 3.1, iA Writer breaks out of its minimalist straitjacket. Syntax Control now highlights parts of speech in blue, yellow, orange, purple and green. She’s a rainbow.

Writer

iA Writer 3

Five years ago this month we released iA Writer for iPad. We built apps for Mac, iPhone, Android, and a whole new iA Writer Pro branch. People who use iA Writer enjoy the experience of writing with it, they love its purity. We released iA Writer 3, the third generation of our writing machine, as a free upgrade to iA Writer Pro.

Writer

Starting Out On Android

In the summer of 2014, we started dabbling with the Android SDK to get a feeling of what it would mean to develop an Android adaptation of iA Writer. We discovered a dev-friendly world with scant traces of the Android horror stories we had in the backs of our minds.

Design

Information Entropy

Will information technology affect our minds the same way the environment was affected by our analogue technology? Designers hold a key position in dealing with ever increasing data pollution. We are mostly focused on speeding things up, on making sharing easier, faster, more accessible. But speed, usability, accessibility are not the main issue anymore.

Design

Putting Thought Into Things

To get a good perspective, we start our projects with research. We go mobile first for prioritization, and we want all the content first so we can design in the browser… Unfortunately, the reality of web design follows a different stereotype.

Writer

Introducing iA Writer Pro

After four years and over 1 million downloads of iA Writer, we’ve introduced something new. iA Writer Pro is a writing suite that boldly goes where no other writing app has gone before.

Branding

Logo, Bullshit & Co., Inc.

Everybody likes logos. Everybody wants their own logo. Everybody wants to make their own logo. Everybody has a computer and some fonts. Anybody can make a logo. What makes designers think they are so special?

Design

Learning to See

Learning to design is learning to see, an adventure that gets more and more captivating the further you go. A love letter to my profession.

Information Architects

Keio University

One se­mes­ter on “Law and So­ci­ety, Tech­nol­ogy and Power” at Keio Uni­ver­sity, taught by iA Founder Oliver Re­ichen­stein and Pro­fes­sor Catha­rina Maracke.

Writer

Bringing Responsiveness to Apps

iA Writer for Mac is the first native text editor that uses a responsive design. Why did it take so long?

Writer

“400,000 downloads with a super simple app” (Business Insider)

The following Interview on iA Writer and the secret of its success has appeared in Business Insider, who reached out to us, “to get the story on where his app came from, where it’s heading, and what’s wrong with contemporary text editors.”

SPECIAL

Design

“Good design is invisible” (The Verge)

Since iA’s work is informed by its presence in Europe and Asia, The Verge wanted to know our thoughts on the differences between the two, and in particular where he sees the state of Japanese design right now.

PLAN

Writer

Introducing iCloud

We have just updated iA Writer for Mac, iPhone and iPad. We have been working hard to make them compatible with upcoming Mountain Lion and iCloud features. What’s new?

HELLO CLOUD

Design

Twitterror

How do you deal with erroneous tweets? Not any erroneous tweets, your erroneous tweets. The tweets that you misspelled or, worse, that contain information you later discover is false, or a late night knee-jerk response you regret in the morning.

Design

Responsive Typography: The Basics

When we built websites we usually started by defining the body text. The body text definition dictates how wide your main column is, the rest used to follow almost by itself. Used to. Until recently, screen resolution was more or less homogeneous. Today we deal with a variety of screen sizes and resolutions. This makes things much more complicated.

Design

Follow-up to “Sweep the Sleaze”

Our call to question the common practice of blindly adding social media buttons to every page got a lot of attention, and found many friends across the board. This proves we are onto something. Let’s look at some of the more critical reactions.

NEXT

Design

Sweep the Sleaze

Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and brand is providing free advertising for Twitter and Facebook. But do these buttons work?

Design

New Site with Responsive Typography

With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. Screens are changing not just in size, but also in pixel density. Now we need not only responsive layouts, we also need responsive typefaces.

Design

Improving the Digital Reading Experience

There is a difference between checking Google Maps on your iPhone and asking a stranger for directions. It matters whether you listened to Beethoven’s 9th in a concert hall or in your living room, whether it plays from a vinyl LP or from your iPod. King Lear is not the same experience when seen at the theatre, studied on paper, or scanned on a Kindle.

Design

“Why Simplicity Creates Great User Experiences” (DRT)

Interview with William Channer for DRT, focusing on “the importance of keeping interfaces simple, why current websites are complicated and the pitfalls of research and why it’s a good starting point to understand user expectations.” This is the unedited transcript of the interview.

GREATEST MAN

Design

iABC

The idea: Look at the history, shape and sound pattern of each letter, sum it up in 140 characters, and collect a beautiful specimen for each letter.

Writer

On Prices and Features

It’s been two weeks since the launch of Writer for Mac and it went off like a rocket. We sold almost 5,000 copies in two weeks. Of course, version 1.0 had some birth defects (1.01 is out now), but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive—with the exception of a few complaints, mostly about the absence of features, and the price.

Writer

iA Writer for Mac

A better tool doesn’t make a better craftsman, but a good tool makes working a pleasure. iA Writer for Mac is a digital writing tool that makes sure that all your concentration goes into the text instead of the program.

Design

Business Class: Freemium for News?

I had a perspective-changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company (no, I can’t tell you who). He asked me what I think about pay walls.

Design

A Web Designer on Fukushima

I’m not a nuclear expert. I am a 40-year-old Swiss web designer, with a degree in philosophy, living in Tokyo. And I’m a father of a two-year-old boy. I was nonchalant about nuclear energy so far, but recently, I’ve read a lot about it; it’s hard to understand the discussion.

Design

iPad App Sales Numbers: WIRED vs. Writer

We’re tracking the performance of iA Writer with a wonderful app called AppViz from ideaswarm. AppViz not only allows you to track your own sales—you can also use it to evaluate how much other apps make, if you have comparable sales numbers. My first question was: How much does WIRED make?

Design

Form and Information

Here is the lecture iA’s Oliver Reichenstein gave in 2010 at Keio University on creativity, information, and innovation.

Writer

Stephen Fry on iA Writer

When asked which four iPad apps he couldn’t live without Stephen Fry replied: IMDB, Instapaper, Soundhound, and Writer. “Astonishingly simple. Everything goes away except for the writing experience.”

Design

iPad: Scroll or Card?

How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held a conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps, “Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers”. They had an epic battle over this question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?

Writer

A. Burroughs on iA Writer

I wasn’t expecting this. In three weeks, we’ve sold over 13,000 apps and every day we seem to climb up another rung in the App Store. While selling apps makes the product feel real and secures future development, the biggest personal satisfaction comes from the feedback our app gets from professional writers.

WRITE

Branding

Gap: Controlled Brand Demolition? No.

There has been speculation about whether the Gap redesign was a super-dynamic marketing stunt, or just mere tomfoolery. If you know how plump most big corporations are, the answer to that seems pretty clear (tomfoolery). In the light of the recent run of brand redesign hullaballoos, it’s worth discussing whether scandalous redesigns help brand awareness or hurt brand image.

Information Architects

Can Information be Architected?

A presentation with the title “iA on IA,” held at EuroIA 2010.

INFORMATION

Writer

Writer for iPad

“Writer has out-innovated Apple. Writer is actively designed to help you write.” —Fast Company

WRITE

Design

Can Experience be Designed?

Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences”? The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences”. The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses”. The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.

Design

“Web design is engineering” (Jonny Holland)

Jeron van Geel interviewed Oliver Reichenstein on Jonny Holland. He asked a series of questions about the relationship between Philosophy, Design, Japan and Western culture.

PLAN

Design

WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In the form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation.

Design

Cosmic 140—Art for Geeks

Our latest Web Trend Map tells the story of Twitter and its 140 most influential Twitter users. Surprisingly, it’s even more popular than Web Trend Map 4.

Design

Cosmic 140 – Per Anhalter durch die Twitter Galaxis

Hier ist unsere nächste Web Trend Map. In diesem Jahr gibt es keinen Metro-Fahrplan und auch keine Internet-Adressen. Stattdessen zeigen wir die 140 einflussreichsten Twitter User mit #Namen, #Alias, #Kategorie, #Einfluss, #Aktivität sowie wann und was sie zum ersten mal getwittert haben.

Design

Designing for iPad: Reality Check

Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: two news applications, a social network, and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” before we even knew whether the iPad was real.

Design

iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned

From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of Facebook. The prospective: Redesigning Facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now…

FACEBOOK

Design

Meet C140, Our Next Trend Map

It’s one year since our last Web Trend Map. A lot has happened, but there are not enough changes in the landscape of domains in the last 12 months to create another domain-based Web Trend Map. The big changes happened one level higher, on the social layer, that is: On Twitter and Facebook.

Design

API for News? Reuters, NYT & iA Inc.

Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital Operations, New York Times), Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters), and I were asked several questions on the future of news…

Design

What’s Next in Web Design?

I’ve been asked by the Italian magazine L’Espresso to write an article on The Future of Web Design. Here is the (longer) English text.

🔮

Design

Web Trend Map Video Interview

I sat down with the video team of GaijinPot for a short interview about the Web Trend Map.

Design

Can Experience be Designed?

First, think of a number between one and ten. Then take a step back and look at the words “User Experience Design” as if you had never seen them.

Design

Kenya Hara On Japanese Aesthetics

What makes Japanese design so special? Basically, it’s a matter of simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, different from what simplicity means in the West. So are things in general better designed in Japan? Well, actually, it’s not that simple…

Design

The Value of Information

When confronted with the necessity of offering news for free, editors are quick at pointing at the cost involved in news production. Which of course is beside the point. Information on the Internet is as common as snow in the arctic. You can’t expect Eskimos to buy a snowman.

Design

Future of Journalism: A Little Bit of Everything Please

Recently, there has been a quality renaissance in the discussion about the economic future of journalism. While some are still touting the one miracle solution (usually alluding to Google’s business model and success), a lot of ideas have arisen that will probably make up for the economic future of journalism as a whole. Time for a summary.

Design

The Spectrum of User Experience

Designers are narcissists, programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other. That’s why we keep them separated…

Design

Web Trend Map 4: Coolest Gift For Geeks

It hangs in the headquarters of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, WordPress, and Yahoo! Japan. Even the CERN in Geneva has its own copy. The WTM4 poster has caused quite a stir.

Design

Kill Blog Comments?

Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can’t discuss and moderate the discussion at the same time.

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Design

Social Media Marketing? Kaboom, Baby!

“Social media marketing” is bullshit. If that upsets you, don’t read the following text.

☭

Design

New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging

We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem.

Information Architects

Web Trend Map 4: Preview

While the first map was hacked together in an afternoon, the second took a week, and the third devoured a month of concentrated work, the fourth Web Trend Map (due in February) has already taken more time in preparation than all previous versions combined.

Design

The Age of Digital Baroque

After all, blogging is over now, isn’t it? Very probably so.

Design

Webapp Death Match: Google vs. Apple

With websites turning more and more into web applications, functionally as well as aesthetically, it’d be interesting to look at what makes a Web app work in terms of skinning. We start off by comparing two different approaches: HTML-skin vs. desktop-application-skin. In other words, Google versus Apple.

Design

Elvis and the Opposite

A 14-year old video blogger named Fred somehow managed to get a fan base of almost 45 Million users. Now instead of asking how that’s possible, Seth Godin and Robert Scoble trivialize his success. Did they forget what Elvis said?

Design

iA Opens Second Office in Switzerland

We had to be unusually secretive about the following developments. But now, we can finally lift the curtain. First, the big news project is finished. Second, we have opened a second office in Zürich, Switzerland.

Design

Data Gourmet

The IT-Revolution promised to free and enrich us. To free us from propaganda, to free us from mindless TV, to free us from advertisement torture, and to enrich us by letting machines do all the boring work so we’d have more free time. So, how did it go?

Design

Surfing the Avalanche

The supposed recession is the best thing that could happen to us readers, consumers, new media makers. Avalanche, take us with you!

Design

Web Trend Map V3

Das ultimative Tool für Internetfreaks, die Web Trend Map 2008, ist nun als A0-Poster erhältlich.

Branding

Use Your Real Name When You Comment

Dear anonymous reader, if you intend to be critical: Be our guest. But if you’re our guest, act like a guest.

Design

Web Trend Map 3

We are happy to announce that the coolest gift for geeks, the A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map, as featured by The Guardian, WIRED, Le Monde, Corriere, kottke, Boingboing, Techcrunch, Mashable, Valleywag and literally thousands of blogs.

Design

Web Trend Map 2008 Beta

We present you with the 2008 Web Trend Map, in all its beautiful beta glory. This time we’ve taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

Design

Web Trend Map 2008: New Layers

Those familiar with the new Swiss train station maps may recognize one source of inspiration. We’ve adopted some concepts from our good friend Adrian Schaffner’s work on mapping Swiss train stations.

Design

Trend Map 2008: What’s New?

We’ve redesigned the Web Trend Map from scratch. It’s now presented as an isometric landscape.

📈 🌍

Design

Predictions for 2008

This year we have seven predictions. If they are as accurate as last year’s, we should make this a paid service.

Design

Looking Back on 2007

Here’s what we said was going to happen in 2007 one year ago, compared to what really happened…

Branding

This is madness! No, This is Radiohead

The release of music for free online is certainly no new thing, with many bands finding success through file-sharing. That fill-sharing kills the record industry is also nothing new, however Radiohead recently made it official by showing that it’s possible the make and reach millions without either.

THIS THIS

Branding

Branding Crimes: 4. The Start-Button

We have hated this thing for over 12 years now—the button that launches a pull-up menu. Only the twisted minds over at Redmond could come up with this. Yeah, I know it’s not a real “Start” button anymore, with Vista it’s become more of a clickable logo like the Macintosh one. But, after all this time, it is still a push-up menu. And that is another major branding crime. Why?

Branding

Branding Crimes: 2. Stealing Interfaces

A wonderful example of what not to do if you believe that Brand = Interface. Copying interfaces defines you as a second choice company.

Branding

Branding Crimes: 1. Missing Logo

The Interface is the brand—but few interfaces qualify to leave out the main orientational element—the logo.

Design

Face Off: The Essentials of Online Rebranding

A company may choose to rebrand itself because of a merger, a bankrupting scandal, or because they simply have outgrown their name. These are solid reasons; however, on the web, rebranding should be considered with the caution of a face transplant.

Design

Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

We have done it before, and now we’ve done it again—the poster of most successful websites, mapped to the Tokyo Subway, is back!

Design

A Word on Design Value

The other day we got a telephone call from a business man that planned to “exponentially increase” his Internet performance. His budget? $1,000.

Design

Newspaper Wiki: Schematics

The last couple of days we have received some excellent feedback on our article “Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki”. First of all, thank you to everyone who took the time to study our problem and form an opinion. To be able to receive input from the best people in the field is rare and rewarding. We got lots of applause, together with some questions and reservations.

Design

Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki

After our last post on “The Future of News” we have been asked again and again to illustrate what a newspaper as a wiki would look like. We’re happy to oblige…

Design

Web Ad Spend Overtakes Newspapers

Earlier this year we speculated that in 2007 “Big ad investments start streaming in”. Our prognosis was heavily understated.

Design

The Future of News: How to Survive the New Media Shift

News organizations cannot continue to ignore the global shift from institutionally-controlled media to user-controlled media. They have to redefine their processes and face the obvious question: Do we still need old media for news?

Design

10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed

The San Francisco Chronicle is in financial trouble. InfoWorld stops printing. Time Magazine redesigns its print edition and fires 50 people. Quo vadis, newspapers?

Design

Understanding New Media

You often hear people saying that other people understand or don’t understand the media. Funny enough that the appreciative “he/she understands the media” is applied to success in old media, while “he/she does not understand the media” is applied to old media people fumbling with the Internet.

Digital Strategy and Design

USA Today: Mission Accomplished

When I read this morning that USA Today “refashions itself as a social network”, I got a little shock as I was worried that they are going to eat our client’s lunch. Fear nothing, client. Among information designers the USA Today redesign is a laughing stock.

Design

Pushers and Spammers Should Pay

The amount of spam and flooding blogs and mailboxes is getting worse and worse and worse. How should we stop it?

Design

How to Compete With Free

You should read Mike’s latest article several times. Not because it’s hard to understand, but because it’s amazing stuff. Read it again and again and then read through a whole series of his related articles.

Design

Tirekickers & Co. Ltd.

Yes, we still get requests from people that want us to work for free or deliver comps and sketches “just to see”. And we did some work for tire kickers in the past and once got really screwed by a couple of con-men. So actually we do have some advice for young creative companies and students that work in our field.

Design

Web Trend Map: Reactions

What started as a fun new years card made quite a few waves. The Web Trend Map’s reception so far…

Design

Introducing iPhone Nano & Shuffle

Apple’s iPhone proves again that user experience is brand experience. But I’m still unsure if I really want one; they’re kind of too big and too complicated for an old man like me.

Design

Web Trend Map 2007

As a Christmas and New Year’s present to our clients and readers we have created three fun Internet overviews.

Design

Internet 2007 Predictions

After looking closer at what made the web in 2006, it is time for some bold predictions.

Design

Technorati: Big Business with Bogus Data

Since the PR giant Edelman and Technorati are working together they are both trying to become an industry reference for statistics on the blogosphere. The question is how reliable is Technorati’s data?

Design

Partner in Astroturfing: Boycott Technorati?

We all had a bad feeling about this right from the start. Why is the blog watch-and-search engine Technorati bonding with the No.1 PR giant Edelman? Can we trust them?

Design

Web 3.0: You Say You’re on a Revolution?

Web 1.0 started as a streaming publish-to-read medium; web 2.0 has established itself as a publishing platform for everyone. Now web 3.0 is said to be a technologically advanced Internet, where the user executes and the machines do the thinking.

STATE

Writing

Good Books Want to be Re-read

Good books are good people: Books are people speaking with signs. Meeting cool people several times is nice.

Design

Build a Plane and Fly to Sicily

Since Mondays are typically low energy days, I’d like to share this story with, to reassure you: If you have a strong vision—no one can stop you.

Design

The Electronic Gentleman

If you have a website that is not user friendly, you have an unfriendly website which basically means that you lack manners. The specialists use that word (“user friendly”) so often that they forget that “friendly” actually is an ethical term.

Design

The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard

Using 10 pixel Verdana made sense in a time when screens were 640 pixels wide. Today it is a mistake.

📐

Design

Read Different: Apple Ads in Japan

Last Sunday, they started airing the “Hello, I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC” ads here in Japan. And here’s a surprise: they’re different. The Mac guy isn’t particularly cool and the PC guy is a real “salary man” type. The ads aren’t as obvious as the Western originals.

Design

New Athens

When people ask me about my background, they’re confused. I studied philosophy. How come I do web design? In short: The old Greeks brought me here. What can Internet workers learn from the old Greeks?

Design

Reactions to 95% Typography

An avalanche of comments, hundreds of applauding blog entries, honorable mentions from cooler and more sublime and hotter and higher places, forum discussions, translations in Chinese and partially in Italian and even blunt plagiarism was incited by one of my recent notes.

Design

Jakob Nielsen, Time Machine?

In 2001, usability guru Jakob Nielsen—according to USA Today “the next best thing to a true time machine”—was convinced that by 2007 books would be gone and “fully replaced with online information”. Was he being serious?

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Branding

Coca-Cola and The Matrix

Brands make us associate positive values and positive experiences with the products they mark. Brand values are defined by the senior management in the “Brand Matrix”. Coca-Cola recently changed their brand matrix. Are we soon going to associate other things with Coca-Cola?

Design

The Interface of a Cheeseburger

All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonald’s, iPod, or Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface *is* the brand.

Design

Web Design is 95% Typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Design

Design is How it Works

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Design

CI and CSS

Corporate design manuals, CSS, information architecture and object oriented programming follow the same principle. They are modular.

Design

Why is Simplicity Difficult?

Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and filled with too many words. Why do designers have a hard time to keep it simple?

WHY EASY DIFFICULT

Design

Internet Consulting?

The Internet business took a hard hit around 2000 after the tech bubble burst. To call yourself an “Internet agency” or even an “Internet startup” was considered nothing less than masochistic. That is when most Internet companies started to get into “consulting“ and “branding” and “marketing”.

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Design

Usability News: The F-Pattern

Since I’ve started developing websites I’ve been looking for the ideal layout. Today I got another hint on the direction to take. Jacob Nielsen calls it the “F-Pattern”.

Design

Internet Users Visit Only 6 Websites

We now have over 75 million websites we can go to, but still we only visit six of them regularly, as we just learned from a study recently made public by Directgov. Their findings make us think of a new phase of the Internet.

Design

Usability and Branding

Your website is more important for your company and its brand portfolio than your business card, your brochures, the products you sell, your packaging, the address and the building your company resides in.

Design

Usable Interface Design

As an information designer the interfaces we currently work on—no matter whether Apple or Windows—bother me. Yes, OS X looks a lot better than its predecessors, and Windows’ upcoming rip off of OS X looks better than the previous rip off.

Design

The Right-Side Column: Just Noise?

If it is your side column on your website you want it. But does your user read—or even: see—it? You might argue that the side column is standard. So we do need it. Do we?

NIKE

Design

Do We Really Need a Site Navigation?

Whoever performed any usability tests knows that users look at the content straight away. Users first look the pictures, then at the titles, then at the text. Navigation often gets completely ignored. In my seven years of conceiving websites and monitoring usability tests I am tempted to say that navigation is useless.

ABLE WITH REAL WANT PLACE

Design

How Important is Design on the Web?

Internet users can give websites a thumbs up or thumbs down in less than the blink of an eye, according to recently published study report. Nature.com and Wired recently reported on the fact that we pass judgement on a website in less than a second. This sounds like good news for web designers. Is it?

Japan

Startup in Japan (2): Find an Accountant

I needed an accountant for my new company and so I checked out a couple of websites and made a couple of appointments. And if you think accountants are boring, you are so very wrong.

🗾 💥

Japan

Startup in Japan (1): The Basics

Setting up a company in Japan as a foreigner isn’t as difficult as you might guess. Of course, it helped that I knew some things about Japan, and starting off—before I started off.

🗾

Design

What is an Idea, and How Much is it Worth?

An idea is not some pink cloud that looks like a bunny. The Greek word “Eidos” originally meant “form, shape”, and that is what a real idea is.