Imagine a presentation app that allows you to write professional presentations in under 20 minutes. Its beautiful typographic templates automatically scale to any screen. You can create, fine-tune, rehearse, and present your deck anywhere. On your laptop, tablet, or phone, as you see fit.

Most presentation apps make us spend hours fiddling with layouts, colors, and fonts… only to end up with boring, cluttered slides. iA Presenter takes a different approach: it lets you focus on your story. In under 20 minutes, you create a beautiful, typographically precise deck. And now, for the first time, you can do it all on iPhone and iPad.

The Idea

The Problem with Common Presentation Apps

PowerPoint and Keynote were built for desktop computers, with point‑and‑click interaction models designed in the 80s. They assume landscape formats and fixed templates that don’t scale to other screens.

AI-powered “next-gen” apps didn’t fix this. They just added autogenerated clichés on top of the same bloated workflow. They help you decorate slides, instead of shaping a meaningful message.

Fast and Focused

iA Presenter starts from text, not design. You focus on your message; Presenter takes care of visual clarity. Its responsive templates scale beautifully to any screen, from iPhone to projector. You create, rehearse, and present anywhere, without losing focus or quality.

We’ve learned a lot since the first launch. Of course, everyone wants more features, but the main lesson was this: What makes Presenter stand out isn’t its look or its features, but its simplicity and speed.

Version 1.5

Instead of adding more to version 1.5, we focused on simplifying the app further. We moved even further away from PowerPoint and brought it closer in spirit to our first app, iA Writer.

It’s simpler, faster, and more focused. After conducting a series of user interviews this spring, it became clear that to make it work even better on mobile phones, we had to further simplify our templating system.

Simple Default

PowerPoint and similar apps start by letting you pick a design. Making your presentation look good right away sounds helpful. But in practice, it distracts. It shifts your attention to how the slides look instead of what you want to say.

Putting the focus on design from the get-go is a fundamental mistake. To make the user concentrate on the message, the design should stay in the background… until it’s time for design. Flashy colors in the default template are counterproductive.

In Presenter 1.5, we default to a simple black-and-white design. Instead of being dropped into a colorful, design-heavy template, you start with a clean black-and-white layout in the International Typographic Style, so you can concentrate on your content.

Starting in iA Presenter: Just write — **Starting in iA Presenter:** In iA Presenter, you start with your script, not with decoration. The default is plain white. No wasted time picking colors or fonts. Just focus on your story.

Neutral default iA Presenter theme — **Neutral default theme:** White is the default because loud design distracts when you’re still figuring out what to say. Once the story is solid, you can change the look in seconds without breaking anything.

Start in Keynote: Pick a Layout — **Start in Keynote:** In Keynote, the first step is picking a design. That’s like choosing a costume before you know the role. It’s backwards. Until you have content, design is just a distraction.

Keynote Black and White Theme — **The most efficient Keynote template:** Black and white. Because it lets you focus. But if you later try to switch themes, you pay the price: text shifts, layouts break, images don’t fit, and you get stuck pixel-pushing slides back into place.

Rather than picking a random template based on taste or color preference, you begin with what you want to say. You stick with a neutral template until your story is solid. Once your content is ready, you can change fonts, colors, and layout details like footers, font scaling, or logo size.

Careful Typography

To simplify the slides while improving typographic quality, we redesigned and rebuilt our template system from scratch. The new templates offer more flexible layouts, smarter content analysis, better performance, and more efficient use of screen space. Line height, margins, font weight… every element has been carefully refined.

Title Slide Desktop Mobile — **Title Slide:** Similar to the black-and-white themes available in PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote, but with improved typography.

Table of Contents Desktop Mobile — **Table of Contents:** Vertically centered text blocks for visual balance. There will be more control for vertical centering in a later version.

Textslide Mobile Desktop — **Textslide:** The default text size has been scaled down for scalability, but you can now adjust title sizes.

Text and Image Layout — **Text and Image:** There is also a two-column layout for text and image only. Again, the text is vertically centered by default.

Three Columns Layout with Images Desktop and Mobile — **Three Columns Images:** Upon popular demand, iA Presenter now aligns three elements, text, images, or mixed, in three columns by default.

Three-Columns Text Mobile Desktop — **Three Columns Text:** Seems easy, but finding the right vertical logic was quite hard in a liquid layout with different text block sizes.

Mosaic Mixed Mobile Desktop — **Mixed Mosaic:** Useful for comparisons where you mix images and text.

Image Mosaic Desktop Mobile — **Image Mosaic:** Automatized, if you use more than four elements (not encouraged).

We spent weeks fine-tuning the typography. With thought-through vertical spacing, type sizes, padding, margins, the liquid type metrics, iA Presenter delivers a typographic quality that is unmatched. In this first step, we offer two designs: The International or Swiss Style in the Helvetica template, and a classic French book design in the iA Garamond template.

Title Slide Desktop-Mobile Garamond — **No Bold**: Classic book design uses different type sizes and grades rather than weight to discern titles and body text.

Textslide Mobile Desktop Garamond — **Premium Typographic Templates**: Different fonts require adjustments in type size, line heights, and margins. iA Garamond is our first premium template.

Table of Contents Desktop Mobile Garamond — **Centered Titles**: Again, borrowing from classic book design, and more in tune with the traditional use of the typeface, the titles in the Garamond templates are centered.

Three Columns Text Mobile Desktop Garamond — **Responsive Typography**: The weight of the type adjusts to match the type size and the background color (lighter on black backgrounds).

Mosaic Mixed Mobile Dektop Garamond — **Highly flexible**: Depending on the layout, we realign the position of titles.

Two Columns Desktop Mobile Garamond — **Text and image**: By default, the iA Garamond is black on a white background. You can, of course, add more colors once you get to the design stage.

Getting vertical spaces, margins, and typesizes for all the layouts just right was much harder than anticipated. There are hundreds of combinations between different layouts, heading types, and text categories.

iA Presenter’s typography scales as you change the window size, and it adapts to different screen sizes. You need to try it to experience the full power of responsive slides.

Compromises

For years, the most common request was not a new feature. It was: “Give us the app on iPhone and iPad.” We’ve had stable beta versions for a while. What held us back was one major hurdle: Web Sharing.

Building an account system took more time and energy than expected. We’re close, but as always, the last 20% takes 80% of the effort. So we chose to release Presenter on the App Store now, without Web Sharing, rather than delaying it further.

This hurts. Especially after putting so much energy into simplifying it. Look how much simpler and cleaner the new Web Sharing is:

Online Handout View — **Handout View**: Instead of sending dense slides that require a lot of pinching and speculation, Web Sharing creates a clean article view. Your full text and visuals are presented like a document, easy to read and share.

**Online Slide View**: If you want the classic slide-by-slide format, it’s there too. Switch anytime between a readable handout and a full-screen presentation—without duplicating work. Notes are shown as sub-titles.

The second compromise: we had to hold back on some UI simplifications. Five years in, we have a clear vision of how to further streamline the Editor. You’ll see those improvements roll out after Web Sharing is implemented across all platforms.

Conclusion

After years of testing our iPhone and iPad apps, we’re going live with a brand-new, simple, beautifully crafted template system. Web Sharing will follow soon.

iA Presenter is now the first presentation app designed from the ground up for mobile and touch. You can write, edit, refine, and present, anywhere, on any screen, without losing your focus or your mind.