Once again, we’re stepping into the holiday season with our popular advent calendar and a big round number.
This year, iA turns twenty, and we’re marking the moment with 20 sets of wallpapers, each tied to a story that shaped us. Each set comes in versions that span the full day, calm during work hours, wild like dreams when the night drifts. One set unlocks every day. The last five review this year and hint at what’s coming.
9th: Light and Darkness
On the client side, we worked with The Guardian, Red Bull, Freitag, and Nikkei. Behind the scenes, we started making type, a form of meditation that became an obsession. Our first font, iABC, was a sketch, a poetic take on the origins of letters. Designing letters we shape both the form and the space in between.
The universe is dark, and light the rare exception,
Yet neither stands alone—they shine in mutual reflection.
There’s logic to it, but getting it right is in our eye and in your hands. The first big step was creating custom fonts for iA Writer. We almost used iA Sans but chickened out and settled on a modified IBM Plex. Then came Duo, for a better gray value. Quattro followed, mostly because it looked good. Then iA Sans, iA Serif, and iA Garamond, now used in our presentation templates. iA Garamond will eventually… more on that later. Today’s wallpaper set illustrates the infinite fascination of looking at letters up close.
8th: Aftershock
Day 8 shows how a day during the crisis in 2011 felt. It’s mix of different waves darkly blending into the curtain of Twin Peak’s Red Room. Referencing Twin Peaks is not an accident. Its director, David Lynch was a master of finding beauty in darkness. He passed away this year. This series is a tribute to a creative mind that remained “wild at heart and weird on top” until the very end. An art spirit we learned from and grew with over several decades.
In 2012, we slowly came back from the shock and we woke up to something different. iA was founded in the middle of the Web 2.0 optimism. In 2008, Obama got elected with the power of the Web. In 2012, he got reelected, but Web 2.0 was over. Closely observing online disinformation during the crisis, we knew that we were witnessing the roots of a digital mess. Technology is an amplifier, it amplifies power, and whoever is in power amplifies what serves them best. As Web designers we felt responsible. We had to do better. First, we found relief in studying type design. We made our first font, iABC, after a poetic study of the origin and meaning of letters and designed our Website using our own responsive typeface, diving into a rabbit hole of responsive typography.
7th: Shock
2011 was shaping up to be another good year. But as we were about to put the finishing touches on iA Writer for Mac, the office started shaking. In Japan, earthquakes are almost as common as rain. This one was different. We held our monitors that were shaking on our glass tables. We put them face down on the floor and stepped outside, looking at the city around us. Trains stopped, the cellphone network broke down. Everyone walked home, some for four, five, six hours. Shibuya’s skyscrapers moved in the aftershocks like poplars in the wind. Reality turned into a movie. TV, Japan’s pacifier for adults, blared with dire warnings. Again and again the tsunami rolled in, nuclear plants exploded, and we were told that we were safe. After the S waves came the alpha waves, beta waves, gamma waves. Supermarkets emptied out in 24 hours. First the toilet paper, then rice, the water, in the end even chewing gum was gone. No ads on TV. It was meant to signal readiness, humility, and hands-on leadership, but it felt staged. He looked drained, pale under the studio lights, asking us to 頑張る, to work hard and do one’s best, to strive unrelentingly in the face of difficulty. But there was nothing we or he could do. Friends and family were calling, begging us to leave the country. The days, weeks and months following 3/11 we were wandering through Twin Peaks’ Red Room, losing our minds. It took some time to find words for what hit us in 2011, which is why the 7th is left black.
6th: iA Writer
2010 was a big year for us. iA Writer for iPad, our first app, hit the App Store. Having worked on iPad apps for Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, we had a head start in design. The app was tested in our network of UX designers and typographers using literal paper prototypes. It sold so well, we hit #1 in practically every store. Hard to believe that this was already 15 years ago. We now offer apps for Mac, iOS, and Windows. There’s an Android app, but Darth Vader has frozen it in Carbonite. Since 2010, we’ve sold over three million copies. iA Writer has won several AppStore App of the Year awards. This summer it became a finalist in the Apple Design Awards. Economicaly, 2025 it is already its most successful year to date. When it launched, iA Writer had no settings, no font choice, no title bar. Instead, it introduced Reading Time, Keyboard Extension, Focus Mode, Auto Markdown, and a colored caret… features that have since become standard in many writing apps. It was the first focused Markdown writing app. To celebrate iA Writer’s simplicity, today, we offer only one wallpaper with a ıııiıııııııl modification.
5th: UXD
2009 was a year of real momentum for the iA design team. After opening our office in Zurich, we redesigned one newspaper after another. Our design team grew quickly. In the middle of the heat we created The Spectrum of User Experience, a colorful graphic that cut through the chaos of shifting design jargon at the time. It gave us a clear structure when terminology kept changing. Even now, we frame decisions through the same three lenses: Business, Technology and Design. In reality, all these notions blend into each other, which is why we now offer the original graphic in a set of super-blurred versions of the original graphic.
4th: Web Trend Map
In 2008, we scaled our Second Web Trend Map from A2 to A0. One year later the third version became the cover image of TASCHEN’s bestseller Information Graphics, followed by the Big Bang edition in 2010. The web felt wide and open, with many paths and many players. Today it is owned by a handful of corporations. Now you know why for fourth set of wallpapers we went all in on The Matrix. The Wallpapers show its signature digital rain, but made from Tokyo station names. Amber and green recall old school monochrome computer screens. The rainbow version holds on to our hope for a more vivid Internet.
3rd: Editorial Design
In 2007, we redesigned the weekly magazine DAS MAGAZIN using our 95 percent typography and 100E2R principles. Reading time rose by an order of magnitude, and visitors multiplied several times within a short period. It became our first major editorial project and led to further work for Tages-Anzeiger, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Krone, Internazionale, Salzburger Nachrichten, The Guardian, and Nikkei, for whom we have shaped the core digital experience for more than a decade and continue to do so today. The third set puts the big letters of DAS MAGAZIN to use.
2nd: The Cosm of Typography
In 2006, we found that typography is one of the bridges between beautiful and functional design. In an big take that became widely quoted, we argued that Web Design is 95% typography. The second wallpaper set offers a cosm of letters.
1st: Founded in 東京
iA launched in 2005 in Nishi Azabu, Tokyo. The founding idea of iA was that it should be possible to create digital design that is both functional and beautiful. We’re starting this series with wallpapers that capture a little bit of Tokyo at different times of day. You’ll find static versions for each moment, plus a dynamic macOS version that shifts as the day moves.
What’s next?
We started out with 2.0
when hope was high and fear was low
Then ads took over every stream
and agencies forgot their dream
As tech went cold and lost its flow
we built a new iA.0
But why and how that went
we’ll tell you on the 10th.
A lovely present from Japan
Are you looking for Christmas shopping ideas? The new iA Notebook inspires careful writing and makes a thoughtful gift.
