We all have plenty of reasons to get mad about how messed up things are around us. And so we do get upset about buggy apps, dysfunctional workplaces, and that ugly new building across the street. Only a tiny few are mad enough to do something about it and make things better. Why?

Most of the time, we calm ourselves by saying that we lack the time, money, skills, or power to improve things. “It’s not my job.” So we accept things as they are and do nothing. It takes courage to imagine what does not yet exist. It takes courage to risk failure, to keep going even if you may be ridiculed for daring to rage against the machine. It takes mad courage to keep going when you know that you may indeed just be crazy.

It takes the courage to be wrong, to be misunderstood, and to be laughed at. It takes the will to think for ourselves, the readiness to be wrong, and the nerve to look like a complete fool. Not once, not eventually, but day after day, all day long, again and again, repeating tirelessly what does not work until it works, fully aware that we may indeed end up not just being misunderstood, but really being wrong, ridiculous, or insane.

To improve things just a tiny bit, to catch a spark of beauty, we need to embrace, enjoy, and carefully develop what regular people consider to be insanity. The really crazy thing is that we do not know who is right and who is wrong unless we try and keep trying, until we succeed or fail.¹

Madness and Imagination² is iA’s Oliver Reichenstein’s opening talk for this year’s Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. Get your ticket before the event sells out; it always does because it is always awesome.

Authorship has been part of iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, and Mac for some time. Now it is coming to Windows.

Common writing software treats all text as if it poured from one source. But words can be pasted from notes, revised from an older draft, added by a collaborator, quoted, spellchecked, or generated by AI.

This matters because a spellchecker makes a blind correction. A quote loses its source. Leftovers from AI blend in at first glance and fall apart on closer reading.

In most editors, these differences disappear. In collaboration, changes slip through. iA Writer, in contrary, tracks authorship and makes visible who wrote what. Seeing where text came from helps ensure that everything is there on purpose.

What it does

Authorship shows where text came from. It marks the difference between what you wrote, what came from somewhere else, and what changed along the way.

Knowing where words came from matters. It matters for editing, collaboration, teaching, revision, and thinking.

Writing was never purely solitary. There were always editors, friends and sources involved. And now, that our tools are built for faster, more complex collaboration, text editors should reflect the sources. In times of Large Language Models, we need tools that put an honest light on authorship more than ever.

Get it early

If you have a license for iA Writer on Windows and want to help us test Authorship before release, join the beta and tell us where it works, where it confuses, and where it breaks.

Last week, iA Notebook received the rare iF Design Gold Award 2026. In just one year, the Notebook shot iA to the top of iF’s global design rankings.¹ We took this as a good opportunity to share how iA Notebook is made.

The film follows the process in the workshop. Paper is cut and stacked. Signatures are folded, then sewn. Covers are glued and pressed. Blocks are trimmed. Corners are shaped. The notebooks are wrapped and packed. No commentary, just insight into how it was made.

It is a slow, precise process. Each step depends on the one before. Small decisions matter. Pressure, timing, alignment. The book’s simplicity is built through a sequence of careful moves.

This short documentary is quiet but not silent. Its rhythm comes from machines and from the hands that guide them. Cuts, folds and presses form a kind of choreography. Watching the process gives a sense of what goes into each notebook.

Writing is hard work. Sometimes we can focus for hours without feeling any strain. Sometimes we feel exhausted before completing the first paragraph, and we don’t know why. What can we do to get—and stay—in the flow?

We can fully attend to only one thing at a time. Multitasking is an illusion. Task switching is expensive. To write well, you need to protect your focus. You either write, structure, or format. Avoid doing everything at once. You’ll write better, and enjoy it more.

Summary: Keep ’em separated

How do we deal best with a complicated matter? We separate it into different tasks and do them one after the other. We focus on one thing at a time. Writing is no exception. It demands concentration. Yet writing on a computer usually invites the opposite: finding words, structuring the narrative, and formatting all at once.

We write best when we do each aspect with as much focus as possible. Focus creates joy. And when we enjoy what we do, we do it better.

• We express ourselves best when we focus on what we want to say.
• We structure best when we focus on the order of ideas.
• We format best when we focus on presentation.

When we give each aspect of writing our full attention, we do it as well as we can. The difficulty is that message, structure, and expression are intrinsically connected and eventually come together in the final presentation. To avoid switching too often, we need boundaries that help us focus on one task at a time.

Writing needs initiative to get started, persistence to keep going, and once we find our voice, we need to carefully hold onto it. Having to master so many different skills makes writing especially fragile. We get distracted not just by outside signals, but by the different aspects of writing that constantly call for our attention.

To stay focused, we need to understand the ideal conditions for each aspect of writing and identify what exactly distracts us. Once we understand the good, the bad, and the distractions, we can figure out how to replace bad habits with new habits to write better.

1. Our Brains While We Write

1.1. When you type just type, when you structure, just structure…

The solution to staying focused while writing sounds trivial: When you type, just type. When you structure, just structure. When you format, just format. Why is that so hard?

We’ve been trained to write in apps built for everything, but mainly for the final product: for layout. Word processors, apps to design slide decks, CMS editors—they present, invite, and reward formatting. We highlight, click, drag, align, adjust. And it does feel productive. And it seems efficient to work in the final stage from the start. In fact, it’s the very opposite of efficient. Clicking and tapping, dragging and dropping distracts us from expressing ourselves.

The remedy: If you have a clear idea of where you are going, just type, and forget everything else. Focus on typing paragraphs and grouping them under plain headings. Structure and format later.

1.2 Typing, Structuring, and Formatting are Different

We use different parts of the brain when we write, when we structure, and when we format. Writing relies on language processing and motor coordination. Structuring requires a different type of abstract thought than regular verbal expression. Formatting involves spatial processing and activates different brain regions. Activating different processes in succession uses time and energy. It drains us in an insidious way: as we switch tasks, we don’t notice the energy we waste. We don’t even notice how much time it takes to switch. The key to writing well is doing the very opposite of multitasking: reducing context switching and staying in one mode of thought for longer. ¹

Simply put: Every time you stop to rethink the order of your narrative or you change gear and start styling how words look, you lose your train of thought.

“…good writers performing more efficiently than poor writers with respect to brain regions activated during a writing task across handwriting, spelling, and idea generation.”²

To change a sentence into a different color, font or font variant, your mind needs to switch into a different mode. It switches from verbal to visual. It switches from what do I feel and how do I express it? to how does this look and how do I make it look better? ³

1.3 Switching Modes Drains Our Focus

If you enjoy both writing and design, you may have sensed that doing both in quick succession feels strangely frustrating. You like both, but not back to back. It’s not laziness. We can focus on either for hours. The frustration comes from switching between fundamentally different types of focus. We experience pleasure in work only when we can do it with full concentration.

Writing and structuring can be highly pleasant tasks. But switching from writing to structuring and formatting is like jumping between your favorite song and your favorite movie every few seconds. You ruin both. The more we enjoy doing one thing, the harder it is to abruptly shift to something else, even if we normally enjoy it, too.

2. The Hidden Cost of Multitasking

2.1 Similar Tasks Can Cause Greater Mental Friction

There’s overlap between writing, structuring and formatting: Verbal and visual language go hand in hand. We need to format when we write. We need paragraphs, we need to group those paragraphs with headings. Sometimes the emphasis on a word is an essential part of the meaning we want to express. And vice versa: formatting and structuring are connected, and both require writing. There is an unavoidable overlap. But we do each better when we do them separately. Focus improves everything. Typographic design can be deeply satisfying, but not when it’s tangled with sentence construction.

“Switching between tasks that require overlapping cognitive processes typically results in greater switch costs than switching between tasks engaging distinct processes.”⁴

Switching tasks takes more time and energy than we realize. It happens in three steps: disengage, shift, reengage. ⁵ That mental shuffling costs attention and drains energy. Ironically, switching between similar tasks—like writing and formatting—can be even worse because they demand overlapping brain resources. You’re asking overlapping mental resources to do conflicting jobs.

2.2 How Graphical Interfaces Hijack Our Attention

Jef Raskin, inventor of the Macintosh, called it a shift in “locus of attention.”⁶ A keystroke takes about 0.2 seconds. A mouse click takes over a second.⁷ The real loss? It’s not in time. It’s in attention. When your hands move, your thinking moves. And when your thinking moves, your writing stalls. It can take up to 10 seconds for us to fully switch focus.⁸

When we move from one set of tasks to another set we lose more time and energy than we realize. Switching tasks requires so much brain power that we run out of energy to realize just how much time we’ve just lost.

2.3 Why Formatting Breaks the Flow of Thought

Writing and formatting are two types of actions. Two forms of language. Two modes of thought. And yet, attention is singular. We can only focus on one thing at a time.

“…an essential fact about your locus of attention is that there is but one of them.” –Jef Raskin⁹

Switching between writing, structuring, and formatting is like doing a triathlon where you switch from swimming to biking to running every 30 seconds instead of finishing each leg. You never hit stride.

3. How to Stay Focused While Writing

3.1 Separate Form and Content

To write in a focused way, you have to just write. That means consciously drawing boundaries between drafting, structuring, and formatting.

We polish too soon. We format before ideas are clear. We structure and restructure too early because it’s easy to do. Modern writing tools tempt us with formatting bars and instant layout feedback. But this convenience comes at the cost of clarity.

That doesn’t mean never format or structure while writing—you need some basic organization. Paragraphs help. Headings help. A simple outline helps. But multitasking between modes of thought kills focus.

Writing takes time. Structuring takes time. Formatting takes time. Do each one at a time, as separately as you can, and you’ll do them all better (and faster).

Try it. Write one paragraph. Then another. Add a heading. Keep going. It’ll feel quieter. Cleaner. Clearer. You’re not switching modes. You’re just writing.

3.2 Replace Old, Bad Habits with New Good Ones

Markup can help you focus—if you keep it light. Don’t overload your first draft with links, images, or formatting. For early writing, paragraphs and headings are enough.

Changing habits is hard. Especially old ones. But the reward is enormous. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it, the most enjoyable activities are often the ones that require effort to start. But once you hit flow, you don’t want to stop.

“Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.”— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience¹⁰

Learning a tool like Markdown may seem tedious at first, but it’s easier than you think. And once you do, it frees you. You stop clicking and start thinking. That’s when writing becomes joyful again.

Summary

We only have one attention. Multitasking is an illusion. Task switching is expensive. To write well, you need to protect your focus.

Traditional writing tools distract you. They invite multitasking and reward surface polish over substance. To write better, separate writing from formatting. Draft first. Style later. Focus is everything.

Writing is hard—but when you get into flow, it becomes something else: absorbing, clear, energizing. Once you’ve felt that, you won’t want to go back.

Europe runs on American IT infrastructure. Under the new US administration, Europe’s digital dependency has moved from convenience to vulnerability. Microsoft Office has become the symbolic starting point for change. Doing this right will require more than changing to open source. The economic opportunity is not a new logo from a cheaper vendor. It is replacing an obsolete model of work.

While US trade disputes focus on cars, steel, and agricultural goods, the critical imbalance for Europe lies in software.¹ Economically and politically, US high tech makes Europe look like the loser that Twitter portrays it as on a daily basis. Europe’s digital dependency on the United States has quietly become a geopolitical risk.² The tariff wars did not create that vulnerability. They exposed it. If that infrastructure were ever used as a political weapon, the consequences would be devastating.

In 2026, this scenario is no longer that far-fetched. The US economy needs Europe buying its tech. One year without EU income would be very difficult. But Europe completely depends on US tech to function. Even a temporary disruption to core US platforms would severely disrupt European administration, logistics, and finance. With the rise of AI technologies, the dependency will only increase.³

Across Europe, governments are asking: “How can we decrease our dependency on American infrastructure?” One of the first symbolic targets of the European IT independence movements is Microsoft Office. The plan is to replace it with an open-source clone of the old classic. Is that realistic? What exactly would replace it? And how would it be done?

Getting Out of MS Office

The Escape Plan

Europe has few digital assets it can leverage in retaliation.⁴ If push came to shove, the continent would have to scramble toward Linux and open-source software. An overnight shift would be completely unrealistic.

To reduce that risk, governments are looking for which software modules could be replaced sooner rather than later. What can be replaced without collapsing the system? The leading candidate currently is Microsoft Office with its dominant global market share.

Germany has announced plans to move parts of its public administration away from Microsoft. France promotes “cloud sovereignty” initiatives to reduce reliance on US hyperscalers. The European Commission speaks openly about digital strategic autonomy.

Why is Everyone Against Office?

For example: The Swiss Military

In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, the Swiss Army doesn’t want Microsoft Office 365. In Switzerland, Microsoft Office was quickly singled out because of its compromising cloud dependency. Being chained to the cloud, sending military data to Redmond and Washington raises serious data sovereignty concerns.⁵

And since Microsoft has injected AI everywhere, Swiss Army men and women do not just need to question if the orders are shared (or sold?) to a potential enemy, but whether they have been really thought through by a responsible Lieutenant, generated on a server in Texas. The Austrian Army has already moved to LibreOffice.⁶

For the military, both the cloud dependency and the many opaque AI hooks are serious concerns. But the reason why Office has become Europe’s IT top divorce candidate must have a psychological correlate.

Cost

In spite of being used everywhere by everyone, in 2026, Microsoft Office somehow feels more replaceable than Windows, iPhone, Android, Oracle, S3, or Google Workspace. Replacing operating systems and backend tech is expensive and painful. Apps feel replaceable. And Office? Would you really miss it? Getting rid of it might actually save much more money than the yearly fees.

There are free open-source alternatives like LibreOffice, Open Office, and Nextcloud. They are not better,⁷ but given how buggy, time-consuming, and nerve-wracking Office is, they can’t be dramatically worse either. Or can they?⁸

Efficiency

On a weekly basis, office employees spend nine hours in Email, eight hours in Word, seven hours in PowerPoint, and seven hours in Excel.⁹ They produce 111 emails, five Word documents, two presentations, and three spreadsheets. Formatting consumes enormous time (up to 40% in PowerPoint) to make them “look right”—and they still end up largely off-brand: Roughly 50% of MS Office documents are not brand compliant.¹⁰ So, how many more years do we need to work like this:

Expired Work Model

Producing paper documents, checkered spreadsheets, and plastic slide decks solved a business need in the 1980s. Today, print matters are a minor concern.

Compare Office documents to email and chat. On a weekly basis, the average office worker produces five Word documents, three Excel sheets, and two PowerPoint presentations. Meanwhile, they write over one hundred emails.

Statistically, chat and email are dozens of times more efficient than Word—and roughly one hundred times more efficient than PowerPoint. Is what we write in email less important than what we write in Word or PowerPoint? Not necessarily. Chat and email are more efficient because they make us think about what we want to say—not how we format it.

• When we write a Word document, we focus on how it looks on a piece of paper.
• When we build a slide deck, we spend hours searching for templates and assets.
• When we write an email, we focus on what we want to say.
• When we write a chat message, we focus on the discussion.

Employees spend a large share of their time inside Microsoft Office. Yet hardly anyone enjoys using it.

In short: Psychologically, Office is an obvious target because hardly anyone really enjoys working in it. Some may disagree, but in spite of its gigantic market share and iconic stand, it absorbs significant time and cognitive energy. Much of it is spent on formatting rather than thinking. And if, after all, you still somehow “like” Microsoft products, ask yourself: Do I really want to work inside a 1980s document model indefinitely?

Microsoft aka Macro Data Refinement

Dead Metaphors

Fewer and fewer office workflows lead to physical documents, packed in paper files, stored in metal folders. And yet we all still use their metaphorical cousins. In today’s context, a lot of the old office vocabulary has shifted its meaning from physical to digital. Like that strange symbol formerly known as the “floppy disk”. As metaphors of a long-gone world, they still cast a subtle spell.

In a mobile, multi-screen, cross-time-zone work environment, files float in the cloud and constantly change shape and owner. The Microsoft Office model still anchors its core architecture in static paper formats: the ruler, line height, margins, page numbers, as if they still really mattered.

Working in Office apps, we are trapped in an old world that ceased to exist decades ago. Like the office in Severance, the office embedded in Microsoft Office is fetishized: margins, borders, and page numbers are treated as signals of authority rather than remnants of a paper era.¹¹

So why does everyone, including our kids at school, still use it?

Severance illustrates something so familiar that it’s hard both to recognize and hard to ignore: Fluorescent light. Endless hallways. Ritualized procedures. People performing point-and-click tasks on screens whose purpose they cannot fully explain. And everyone behaves as if the system were natural. It’s both weirdly old and claustrophobically on brand. Sounds familiar? Severance beautifully illustrates how it feels using Microsoft Office all day long, in 2026.

At Lumon, they circle and click numbers whose meaning they cannot see. In Office, we click and circle numbers whose basis we hardly question. A spreadsheet cell feels objective. A chart feels authoritative. The grid replaces doubt. The format replaces understanding. The brand identity makes it right.

We daily open “documents.” We struggle with bullet lists, adjust line heights, and fight with textboxes. We format pages as if they were destined for printers and filing cabinets. We behave as if the final goal of knowledge work were a properly aligned A4 or US Letter sheet. We click aimlessly to make some higher authority visible.

Like the employees in Severance, we do not question the architecture. We adapt to it. The office model embedded in Microsoft Office is hierarchical, paper-bound, and authority-driven. It assumes that thinking culminates in a formatted artifact. This model made sense in 1995. It does not make sense in 2026.

Most of our work is iterative, collaborative, networked, and dynamic. Decisions happen in chat. Coordination happens in shared documents. Alignment happens across time zones. Yet our primary productivity tools still treat work as the production of printable pages.

We are stuck with Microsoft Office because we never questioned its fundamental logic. When schools began treating Office proficiency as a prerequisite for adult life, instead of focusing on writing and thinking, we reached peak absurdity. Microsoft Office at school makes sure that we abolish the only hope to break with the ancient Office theatre: A youth that asks: “Why do I need to care about paper formats, headers, footers, page numbers, and rulers, when I read stuff on my phone?”

Like the employees in Severance, we no longer see how strange the system is. Formatting feels normal. Page numbers feel necessary. Rulers feel inevitable. Hunting for the latest logo or adjusting line height feels important. The absurd has become routine. That is the real dependency.

Putting AI in all of its products is 2026’s version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Microsoft’s WYSIWYG architecture was not designed for machine-readable, structured AI workflows. Retrofitting AI into layout-first systems creates more friction. To get ready for the future, Microsoft would have to rearchitect their whole Office suite and move to structured text.

Replace Office, But Not with a Clone

The Risk of Failure

Europe is discussing replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice. On paper, that sounds like it’s at least worth a try. In reality, changing to a much cheaper supplier instead of changing the system rarely improves the situation.

Replacing Office with any clone cements the idea that we need the model it is based on. But we don’t. We work differently now. Our tools need to adjust to our needs. We shouldn’t adjust our tasks to our tools.

Installing a fragile substitute will lead to failure. What is worse than having to work in Microsoft Office? Having to go back to Microsoft Office. That’s not just humiliating. It will make the overdue initiative to move beyond the obsolete custom formatting infatuation even harder.

For thirty years, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have shaped how people work. Employees have stopped complaining because they can’t imagine that business works without the Office theater. Lists need to refuse to indent. Files must come in a format. Apps need to crash. Documents need to corrupt data. Formats need to be bloated.

The Only Thing We Hate More Than Bad Software Is New Software

Why worry that Office will come back? This is not the first time Germans tried to break out of Microsoft’s embrace.

In 2017, after years of debate, Munich’s leadership voted to migrate back to Microsoft Windows. The decision was framed as a move toward efficiency and standardization, reflecting deeper management and political challenges.¹²

Studio Linux thinks that the challenge was change management. Yeah. Change management is always difficult. Change management for apps that people have used for 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years is a complete nightmare.

Usable is not what is well designed, but what we are used to. Office is slow. It is heavy. Its file structure is absurdly complex. But it is familiar. We think this is how things must be because trying something new feels more painful than dragging the old thing along.

We do not dislike bad software as much as we dislike changing our behavior. Microsoft Office’s flaws are fundamental and recurring. Those flaws are expected. They are familiar. They are part of the brand. Office may be bad, but we know the pain—and we know the workarounds.

We may resent Word and PowerPoint, but we know their quirks. We know where the bodies are buried. Swap it for something that looks similar but behaves differently, and resistance hardens. Replacing Office with a clone risks deepening our Microsoft Office Stockholm Syndrome.

If Europe wants change, it cannot simply recreate the same model under a different logo. It must move beyond the document-and-format architecture altogether. What we need is a contemporary, dynamic, simple model.

Focus

At work, the 20th century ended long before it did in global politics. No matter how much AI Microsoft integrates, Office is built on a collaboration model designed for printed documents.

If Europe wants to prepare for digital conflicts, it should not just swap vendors. It should leave obsolete work models behind. The smartest way to strengthen digital independence is not replacing bad software with wobbly clones. It is making work meaningful and enjoyable. Europe does not need a European Microsoft.
Europe, and not just Europe, needs a post-Office model of writing, calculating, and presenting.

The best way to weaken a dependency is to stop relying on outdated systems in the first place. Good technology moves from raw to complex to simple. It’s time to move from the complex Office to a simpler solution. So, how about plain text? Imagine writing and presentation software where all you do is think about what you want to say. The app makes sure that it looks on brand. Yes. That is not just possible. It exists already. But adapting it will require a change of habit, not just a change of vendor.

For over 20 years, NYC Midnight has organized the Inspiring Challenges for Storytellers. In recent years we have been proud sponsors of several of NYC Midnight’s most popular challenges.

We’re partnering with NYC Midnight again as sponsors for their Screenwriting and 100-word Microfiction challenges. As a returning title sponsor, iA will award the top 10 finishers in both challenges with their own copy of iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, macOS, or Windows.

In addition, the top three finishers will also get their own award-winning iA Notebook—the notebook for writers.

About the Challenges

Screenwriting Challenge

Kicking off Feb 13, 2026 the Screenwriting Challenge offers international screenwriters a prime opportunity to put their best foot forward, crafting original screenplays under tight deadlines.

You can learn more, see past winners, or sign up for the challenge until 10 PM (New York time) on February 13, 2026: https://www.nycmidnight.com/scc

100-word Microfiction Challenge

Kicking off on March 20 for the 7th year running. We last sponsored this unique challenge in 2021 and we can’t wait to see what writers come up with this year.

4,500+ (expected) writers across the world will be challenged to create short stories under a tight 24-hour time limit. Random genre, action, and word assignments dial up the heat as writers go head to head against peers for professional feedback, and a chance win great prizes—like iA’s writing tools.

You can learn more about this challenge, see the work of past winners here or register until 10 PM (New York time) on March 20, 2026: https://www.nycmidnight.com/100

How iA Writer helps

From inception iA Writer has helped writers do their best work. The app is beloved by both amateur and professional writers because it is made for distraction-free writing and nothing else. In 2025 Writer was recognized as an Apple Design Award finalist. Learn more: https://ia.net/topics/apple-design-award-2025. Some features that enhance your writing experience include:

Focus Mode

iA Writer’s signature feature allows you to focus on one sentence or paragraph at a time. How does it work?

Style Check

Easily spot fillers, redundancies, or clichés that might be creeping into your text. Cut it down to the essentials. You can also create custom patterns to highlight expressions that you want to avoid.

Syntax Highlight

Pinpoint awkward verbs, repetitive nouns, or excessive use of certain parts of speech. How does it help?

Live Preview

Watch your work take shape in beautiful templates, all in real-time.¹ Or you can choose to work fully focused in the Editor while Preview remains on call.

Multi-Platform

Available for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows devices, Writer allows writers to pickup right where they left off, even on the run! Seeing is believing, Here’s a quick tour of Writer:

Get Started

Registration deadlines for 2026 challenges are quickly approaching. Please be sure to check out the NYC Midnight website for more details.

You can learn more about Writer’s dedicated Fountain template and how you can maximize screenwriting productivity in Writer here.

Download your free iA Writer trial

Mac

Windows

We start the year with a pop-up store dedicated to the iA Notebook at the Roppongi Tsutaya Bookstore, running from the end of January through mid February.

This is our second collaboration with Tsutaya. After T-SITE Daikanyama, the Notebook now appears in another well-known Tokyo location: Roppongi Hills. Right around the corner from our new office.¹

If you are nearby, stop in and try it out. You can buy the iA Notebook right there. If you don’t want to carry it home, it’s also available from our online store, or the growing number of physical stores around the world.

If you miss this one, there will be more opportunities. The sales and distribution of iA Notebook has been growing organically since its launch, and we’re continuing to show it in places that care about books, paper, and use.

Pop-up store period
Saturday, January 31 – Friday, February 13, 2026

Location
Roppongi Tsutaya Bookstore
1F entrance platform, Tokyo

The next pop-up at Tsutaya is planned for March, another one is planned for June. If you run a bookstore or a shop and are interested in featuring the iA Notebook, please get in touch.

* * *

This year marks the second season of our in-house awards. Once again, we received a wide range of submissions: from poems to legal texts, video presentations to blog posts, tutorials and how-tos, biographies, educational material, and more.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted work this year. We enjoyed meeting you and learning more about who you are and what you do. To us it’s less about who wins but who you are and what you do with our work. By seeing your work, learn much more than just what is in your text.

In Season One, we learned that emotion, impact, and logic should guide our judgment. This year, we returned to the same criteria. Each submission was reviewed carefully, and the team voted one by one. Regardless of topic or format, what mattered most when reading was the experience itself. How did this piece make us feel? Time to unveil our two winners.

Writing Award

Dustin Parker, The Future Smells Like Paper

Dustin’s piece received a unanimous vote from the team. It’s an almost perfect ode to imperfection, to the analog living alongside progress, and to the human touch.

Reality isn’t just what exists. It’s what resists.

There was no decorative formatting to sway us, no fancy fonts, no images, no framing. It arrived as raw text in the body of an email (you don’t need to be published somewhere to apply to our awards), and its impact was immediate. His writing is both careful and clear:

Spotify didn’t kill vinyl. It made people realize what vinyl offered that streaming didn’t. The crackle and pop aren’t impediments to the music. They’re proof of physical interaction, a needle tracing a groove in a specific moment in time. High-resolution photography made people fall back in love with film. Text messages made handwritten letters precious. The best technology doesn’t eliminate the analog. It clarifies what made the analog irreplaceable in the first place.

We found ourselves nodding in agreement while reading The Future Smells Like Paper. We build software, continuously refine our apps, live and work fully within the digital world. And yet, a few years ago, we felt the need to create a paper counterpart to our work: the iA Notebook. It is the handmade—and by nature imperfect—sibling of iA Writer. We love using it daily, just as we use Writer. Each serves a different purpose.

Progress isn’t about eliminating friction. It’s about eliminating the wrong friction while preserving the friction that makes us human. Print the thing you claim to care about. Sign your name in ink that bleeds a little. Send a letter that takes three days. Scribble notes on whatever paper you can find. Let objects become evidence that you meant it.

The pen still leaks. I still choose it.

You can find the full version of The Future Smells Like Paper on Dot By Dot.

Presentation Award

Audrey Tang, Democracy in the Age of AI

A few months ago, in the middle of summer, a presentation on Mastodon caught our attention. The text was in Chinese but the design was immediately familiar: the Tokyo theme from iA Presenter, supported by our Web Sharing tool.

We always enjoy seeing our apps used in the wild. When presentations are shared publicly via Sharing, we often pass them along. This one was even more encouraging than usual.

The person behind the presentation was Audrey Tang: civic technologist, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, and a global speaker many of our users already know well. After we shared the original Chinese version, AI 時代下的民主, Audrey kindly replied with a link to an English version so our community could follow along more easily.

Audrey didn’t apply for the iA Awards. Still, we couldn’t get the presentation out of our minds. So we decided to name it Best Presentation of 2025. Not because of the topic alone, but because this presentation is a lesson in storytelling.

No overload of images. No bullet-point noise. Just a clear narrative, carefully paced, with each slide doing exactly what it needs to do. Very few metaphors are used, and they stay with you all along the talk. The text is reduced to what’s essential. There’s rhythm. There’s space. There’s an emotional arc.

Many people feel that with the rapid advance of AI, our future is like a car with only a gas pedal and a brake. We can either floor it toward some unknown “Singularity” utopia, or we can slam on the brakes for fear of a dystopian future…

The ‘Following’ feed creates a ‘For Us’ reality… But ‘For You’ is different. Everyone lives in a hyper-personalized world, tailored just for them…

The AI behind it is a parasitic AI. Its sole purpose is to learn what keeps you addicted and glues you to the screen…

So-called ‘social networks’ have largely become an infrastructure for outrage.

We flipped the incentive for ‘going viral.’ Instead of rewarding the most extreme statements, we rewarded the statements that built the most consensus…

The bigger challenge is the horizontal problem: ensuring a world full of different humans and AIs can cooperate peacefully…

Authoritarianism is a pyramid. Democracy must be a network…

A decentralized, symbiotic architecture is our defense…

In Silicon Valley, you often hear the phrase, ‘Singularity is Near.’ But I’m here to tell you: ‘Plurality is Here.’

The future is not singular; it is plural.

It’s not a slide deck trying to replace a speaker. It’s a presentation designed to support a strong message. This is what we’ve argued for over the years, taken to an extreme: slides should serve the story, not compete with it.

So even if this comes as a surprise: Congratulations, Audrey, and thank you for letting us share your work with our community. You can find below both versions of the presentation:

• Democracy in the Age of AI, the English version
• The original one in Chinese: AI 時代下的民主

See You Next Year

Once again, reading through our users’ work was both a pleasure and an honor. We’re grateful for your submissions and for all the feedback many of you share with us throughout the year, whether by email or on social media. Hearing from you, in all its forms, is a constant reminder of why we do what we do.

Thanks to Web Sharing for Presenter, seeing presentations here and there on social media with a wide range of authors and topics makes us incredibly proud. It also made us realize something: next year, the iA Awards shouldn’t only be about personal submissions. They should also be about recognition: pointing to work we encounter and feel deserves to be seen.

The next edition is already on the horizon. If you haven’t applied in the past two years, consider this an invitation. If you know someone worth to shine a light on, this will be your chance to nominate them. And to those who have been with us from the beginning: thank you. We appreciate your continued trust and curiosity, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll bring in 2026.

Throughout 2025, we kept listening, kept presenting, kept learning, and kept improving our products.

In 2025, iA turned twenty, and iA Writer turned fifteen. During our Winterfest, we took the opportunity to look back on iA’s history, revisiting those years highlighting memorable blog posts from different periods. If you missed it, you can still pick up your gifts and take some time to revisit two decades of iA with us: iA Winterfest 2025.

Notebook, A Year of Recognition

iA Notebook won awards and toured fairs, a rare year of recognition for a product that stays resolutely analog. The Notebook received several honors, including the Red Dot “Best of the Best” Award for Product Design 2025 and the Japan Stationery Award. We showed the Notebook at trade and design fairs in Tokyo, San Fracisco, New York, and in a pop-up store at Tsutaya Books Daikanyama.

Feedback from the fairs led to a new batch of iA Notebook with a black board, improving contrast under different light conditions. Our latest Notebook video went viral. The distribution of the Notebook expanded, with wider availability in the United States and Europe through local resellers, including a series of museums such as SF MOMA and Kunstmuseum Basel.

Presenter in your Pocket

In autumn, we launched Presenter on iOS, a presentation tool that works on a phone without compromise. You can write, edit, refine, and present anywhere, on any screen, without losing focus or your mind. Together with this iPhone and iPad release, the latest version 1.5 of Presenter offers a cleaner default theme and refined typography. Presenter is now available on the App Store for both the Mac and iOS.

Web Sharing, released during Winterfest last year, continued to gain traction. Seeing presentations shared and viewed in the wild has been rewarding. Audrey Tang is using it regularily.

We released the beta version of Charts in Presenter. The ability to display markdown based charts had been requested more often than any other feature. You can now join the beta.

Fifteen Years of iA Writer

iA Writer moves in the opposite direction of most apps. While products usually grow slower and heavier under feature creep, for 15 years, we keept stripping things back, making the app simpler, more focused, and faster to use. On Windows, we released an update with faster startup, a redesigned interface aligned with Windows 11, full-width preview, smarter snippets, improved statistics, simpler notes and commenting. You can read more about it in the release post.

For Mac, iPhone, and iPad, version 7.3 came with an Authorship overhaul, showing who wrote what and what wrote what. As announced in the final days of Winterfest 2025, Authorship will also arrive in iA Writer for Windows, next year.

This year, the team was invited to WWDC as an Apple Design Award finalist. A rare, unexpected and welcome recognition after 15 years of steady work. Creating something innovative, simple, functional, and joyful once is hard. Maintaining that standard—over 15 years and 1,745 updates—is even harder. It takes restraint. Patience. Care.

That’s why this nomination means something different than it would have meant 15 years ago. An app launched in 2010 is being recognized in 2025 for setting the standard. Whether it wins gold, silver, or just a handshake—we celebrate this as a win for true, lasting quality and dedication.

Beyond Our Products

Just a few days ago, a project we had been shaping for years quietly went live: iA Account, our new customer platform is available for everyone who purchases Presenter directly from us. Next year, we will extend iA Account support to the App Store versions of all our apps. This will finally allow you to try our iPad and iPhone apps before buying, and buy organizational and educational accounts across all apps. iA Account removes technical barriers when using our apps on managed Macs for companies and schools. It will help us offering cross platform purchases, make purchasing packaes simpler and tie our apps together.

We went deeper into sharing experience and craft through Maker’s Knowledge, from conference talks to podcasts.

We invested in tutorials and onboarding and held user interviews to better understand our customers. Hearing directly from you shaped how we think about the next steps, and we plan to continue this effort next year.

Our YouTube channel offers Tokyo Focus Tracks, a typographic video series as a tribute to the city where iA was born. Three videos are live, with more on the way.

We strengthen our committment to promote great writing and storytelling. This year again, we were sponsored the NYC Midnight writing challenges and we held the second edition of the iA Awards. You can still submit your text or presentation until December 31st. We will announce the winners in January 2026.

Closing

As we close 2025, we would like to thank our customers. Thank you for using our tools, for writing to us, and for spending part of your year with iA.

The team will take a break from December 31st to January 4th. We wish you a calm and steady start to the year of the Fire Horse. See you in 2026.

We are bringing charts to iA Presenter. Instead of adding options, we added focus. By stripping away the noise of traditional tools, we’ve built a charting system that prioritizes clarity, readable defaults, and a powerful new table editor.

Charts have existed in Presenter from the start, but we hid them. Early versions were technically ready, but they didn’t work. We tried to dress them up, but design is not just how it looks…

Early iterations encouraged the kind of tinkering Presenter is designed to avoid. Adding features is easy, but making them work takes time.

How it started

When we revisited charts after our template update, our first instinct was to clean up the CSS and offer as many chart types as possible. Users could then choose the right one for each occasion.

Adding lots of choice and letting the user decide is a popular way to design apps. It’s the opposite way of how we usually do things. And yet, this time it seemed the right thing to do. Modern charting frameworks make it easy to offer 500 chart types, and more options look like more fun. Too many options, of course, was exactly the problem we couldn’t name.

What we learned

Most chart types add noise rather than clarity. We had to decide what’s useful. We’ve designed charts, tables, and infographics for years, but meeting Nick Desbarats at Smashing Conference this year and later reading his book, Practical Charts pushed us to strip everything back to first principles. It provided the clarity and structure for what we had assumed.

The eye opener: A small number of chart types cover most real use cases. Bar and line charts do most of the work. Even the popular pie charts only work under strict conditions. Many popular formats look impressive but make accurate reading harder. That sounded awfully familiar. So we did what we do best: We built charts around strong defaults and clear limits.

• Fewer chart types.
• Quiet colors.
• Layout constraints that keep charts readable across screen sizes.
• Limits on how many charts fit on a slide, because dense layouts reliably break charts.

Instead of adding a big library, we chose to offer the basics of how charts and responsive slides work. Giving a limited choice forces us to think about the story we want to tell and how to tell it best. Moving forward, we will, step by step, add new features, building on user needs, carefully, slowly, to not overcharge the feature and turn it into a procrastination thirst trap.

Better Table Support

Charts require clean data, which led us to a new, more powerful table editor. This wasn’t just a utility update, it was an opportunity to bring auto-formatting Markdown tables, a long-standing goal, closer to reality. Try it out and let us know where it can be sharper. Push it, break it, and tell us what’s missing. We are going deep on Markdown tables, and once they are polished, they will be available across all our apps.

Try it

Charts in Presenter are now in beta. They are straight forward, simple and of-the-charts fast. This is the moment to try them and tell us how to improve them. Your feedback will help us getting them ready for the premiere in January.

When we released iA Presenter two years ago, we treated it like software in a box. You had to enter a license code to start using the app, or to manage your subscription on the web.

License codes are easy to lose and hard to manage. As Presenter grew, more support time went into finding, verifying, and resending codes. At the same time, we prepared releases for iPad and iPhone. The App Store does not support license codes at all.

Because of this, we are moving iA Presenter to iA Account. Signing in is simple. Enter your email address. We’ll send you a six-digit one-time code. Enter it and you are signed in. Your account is synced to all your Apple devices using iCloud Keychain.

iA Account is available today for everyone who buys Presenter directly from iA. If you are already using Presenter, we’ll send an email to remind you what address you used to purchase your license. Older versions of Presenter will stop accepting license codes soon. To keep using the app, install the latest update.

Next year, we will add iA Account to the App Store versions of all our apps. This will let you try our iPad and iPhone apps before you buy, allow us to offer education discounts, and remove barriers to using our apps on managed Macs in companies and schools. And it will let us ship new features, reduce support friction, and make our apps work seamlessly together.

Existing purchases will carry over to iA Account automatically. With one account, you will be able to manage all iA apps in one place, whether you bought them on the App Store or directly from us.

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 hint at what’s coming next year.

✕

21st-25th: Preview 2026

1. Charts for iA Presenter. They are built in-app, generated from Markdown tables or CSV files. We’ve spent the last few months making them off-the-charts fast and faster. If you want to get a sneak peek, they are now in beta. Sign up to try them out. Read the debut post for more.
2. iA Account will ship across all our apps. With iA Account, verification for our apps works via email. Download, activation, de- and reactivation is quick and easy. It’s available next week for those who purchased Presenter from us directly. Next year, we will bring iA Account to all our apps on the App Store. You’ll be able to try our iPad and iPhone apps before you buy. Read our announcement post to learn more.
3. Authorship for Windows. It is one of our most loved features. Applying signature colors to AI-generated text, explained the feature without using too many words: replace placeholders with what you truly think and feel. Next year, finally, authorship will be available in iA Writer for Windows.
4. Outline. We’ve been working on this forever. We refactored half the app to make it the smoothest, simplest, and most efficient outline function possible.
5. New templates for iA Writer, with an all-new UI and custom fonts.

20th: iAI

The iA Notebook has been 10 years in the making. We announced it in 2023, launched it in 2024, and sold out our first batches in no time. In 2025 we won the Red Dot ‘Best of Best’ award, the Japan Stationery of the Year award and showed it at museums and trade shows around the world. Good things come in threes, and so Apple invited us to Cupertino as an Apple Design Award finalist. Meanwhile iA Writer for Windows got its Leopard update that made it faster and smoother. iA Writer for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS doubled down on its strategy with AI: separating human and machine authorship visually and technically (instead of integrating ChatGPT like everybody else). Our 2025 recap has the full story. iA Presenter now has an iPhone and an iPad app with much simpler, cleaner templates, and it will offer charts very soon. Our wallpapers for 2025 are a tribute to iA Notebook. Those who like to read tea leaves might see something in there or not. Make sure you don’t miss out on our love letter to markdown and the beautifully typographic Tokyo Focus Tracks.

19th: Time wasted on PowerPoint divided by 111

If you work at an office, statistically, you spend between seven and nine hours a day in PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and email, each. In one week you write an average of 111 emails, five Word documents, three spreadsheets, and one presentation. Is a presentation 111 times more important or 111 times valuable than an email? No. Presentaions are wasting our time by focing us to be designers. Finding assets, logos, images, match CI/CD requirements and formatting each element on every slides individually is a complete productivity killer. So, we set out to make presentations as focused as writing an email. iA started working on Presenter before COVID. In 2022, we openly discussed, explained, announced, and openly asked for your thoughts on pricing it. The Mac version launched in 2023. Without a responsive experience and the ability to share presentations as a text and slide hybrid, it did not yet fully convey the idea that drove the app. This year, we added charts, which also made us rethink tables.

18th: Lasers and Presents

In 2022, we added wikilinks to iA Writer. The majority of note-taking apps support linking documents. Upon popular demand, we added the feature so people could use iA Writer in their preferred mix of apps. It required a lot of heavy lifting, and we had to make sure that it kept the app laser-fast and that it stayed invisible to those who still just wanted to write. In the same year, we announced our next app, iA Presenter. We looked more closely at emoji, and in November we lifted the veil on iA Presenter. We asked you about how you’d price our app. Designing Presenter, and how design demands presence and ends up as a gift of time, made us think about presents and presence, design and time. In the tradition of presents for Christmas, we offered a letter template for iA Writer.

17th: May we Have Your Attention?

In 2021, first out of curiosity, then out of necessity, Oliver started looking into ADHD and how it works. He told his wife that someone should think about ADHD-friendly software. Ideally, by someone that knows ADHD from within. She paused and said, almost puzzled, that he had been doing exactly that for twelve years. Only then did it sink in. iA Writer was not just a general app for focus. It was software made by people with ADHD, for people with ADHD. In all our work on focus, that fact had quietly slipped through the cracks. A writing app that works for the easily distracted works even better for those who can focus without special tricks. Looking into who uses our apps, we discovered that a growing number of teachers and students use iA Writer, since, step by step Markdown became a standard at University. In the same year, we took another shot at discussing the pricing of software. This time, we aimed at our colleagues who compare the value of software to coffee. Our point was: software is not a cup of coffee. It’s a coffee machine. We ended the year on topic with a recipe on how to end procrastination. And this is why, representing the year 2021, we offer a 24h set of focused wallpapers.

16th: Drawing lines

In 2020, we spent a lot of time sharpening boundaries. We improved how PDFs work in Writer, with a new preview, better web publishing, and improved editing. We introduced Style Check to help writers see patterns, not mistakes. At the same time, we were vocal about the conditions under which software is made and sold. We wrote about monopolies, Apple, and Epic, reflected on subscription or no subscription, and revisited what it really means to think different. We questioned why the companies that made most money on Apple platforms were not paying the Apple tax. The kerfuffle with Epic ended with Apple cutting commissions from 30 to 15 percent for small developers. Last but not least, we shipped Style Check to Windows.

15th: Ethics, sound, and stability

In 2019, we slowed down and looked sideways. We wrote on ethics and ethics, as a daily design practice. We explored music in writing, rhythm, pacing, and how sound shapes concentration. We refined iA Writer with a new PDF preview and new typography preferences. In the same year, iA Writer was named MacStories App of the Year. Less noise, more trust.

14th: A glass of iced water in hell

In 2018 we kickstarted iA Writer for Windows. Steve Jobs had promised that bringing iTunes for Windows would be “like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.” We wanted to deliver that promise and bring focus to Windows for the first time since Word 2.0. Unfortunately, someone had to go to hell to deliver that glass, and coming from macOS, dealing with Windows frameworks was an ice-cold shower. No clear UI standards, tons of hacks to get around the many limitations in terms of spell check, linguistic tools, typographic limitations, and performance hogs. On Windows 11, Microsoft basically abandoned its native text view. On the other hand, Windows made it easier to offer folding and outline features, and we tested some features that iA Writer users in the Apple world are still waiting for. The good news is that 2026 is the year when we bring all of our apps closer together. More on that after the 20th. Somewhat inspired by the great Alan Kay, 2018 was the year when we got back into blogging. In January alone, we wrote a prophetic piece about AI five years before ChatGPT, took a shot at the ideal paragraph, procrastinated about procrastination, hammered Facebook three months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wrote about money, power and time, sending traffic to the App Store, the need to make bots identifiable, and a second piece on AI. In February we explained how how blogging could save the world, added tabs to our Mac app, went head-to-head with MS Word, looked at how the West was turning into China, wrote about Ethics and Aesthetics, added tags in Writer, and ended with Word Export and a Typographic Christmas. The year was a pull-up exercise in blogging and updates, looking far into the future.

13th: Duo Space and Syntax Highlight

2017! Monospace had been the only choice in iA Writer for seven years. In monospaced fonts every character has the same width, which slows down the reading speed. It supports focused writing. Technically, monospacing is a remnant of mechanical typewriters and their equally spaced hammers. Its wide letters like w, m, or Æ get squeezed, narrow ones float, and the text develops dark spots and white space that compress and extend the rhythm of the strokes. Duo Space keeps the discipline of mono, but corrects its most obvious flaw. Using a simple trick, some characters become one and a half units wide. On their own, they still feel restrained. When two appear next to each other, the texture opens up and the dark spots dissolve. On the way to duo, we made a Triospace (unpublished) and a Quattrospace, too. Meanwhile, our Zurich office became a place of research. Nick Denton joined us at the office in Zurich and Tokyo, for almost a year, to explore how online discussion could work beyond forums and Reddit-style threading. We discussed, built prototype after prototype, and learned a great deal from each other. Meanwhile, our work in Japan accelerated. The collaboration with Nikkei expanded quickly. We worked on their website and apps, deepening a relationship that continues to this day. In December we announced iA Writer for Windows.

12th: ICONS!

In 2016, we went down the icon rabbit hole. Because we believe that one can only understand what one makes, we made a lot of icons, we made pixel iconfonts and retro icon games, and that was a lot of work and a lot of fun. We researched how icons really work, which icons work how and why, and the result was that icons don’t work very well, except for a handful of very obvious ones. Sure, you can use icons with labels, but then why use them at all? Emboldened by our very clear insights, we got rid of a lot of icons in our writing apps and added readable menus instead. iA Writer 4 came with transclusion, the ability to add textdocuments in text documents. Our app was made for people who understand the virtue of clear text). No icons, all text and even text in text! Our beta testers nodded and clapped. What could go wrong? Our users didn’t understand transclusion (we called it “Content Blocks”, because we already foresaw that noone would want “transclusion”). More importantly, our users found that menus made our apps “look like Windows.” The lesson was, once again: Useful is not what, theoretically, works best, but what people are used to. So we took out the menus and put icons back. A couple of years later Apple added menus to iPadOS, and now that we’re all used to them, they’re not “like Windows”, but “amazing,” “gorgeous,” and “magical”. User research outside our hard core beta group may have shown all that before… Meanwhile, somewhat ironically, we did a lot of user research for a client, in Italy, England, German, the UK and in Japan for Condé Nast, a prototype of how VOGUE could work and look in the future.

11th: iA Writer 3

In 2015, we designed Web banking system for over ten banks in Switzerland, worked with Asics on the structure of their new site, and helped shaping some of Red Bull’s organisational tools. On the product side, we launched a new, even simpler version of Writer and started out on Android.

10th: Big in Japan

In 2014, two years before the next US election, it was already clear to us that after Web 2.0, misinformation and disinformation would start shaping the world at a scale we had never witnessed before. It was time to put thought into things. 2014 was one of our best years as an agency. But we saw the signs: Clients built strong in-house teams while big tech and consultancies hovered one studio after the other and occupied our space. Fjord joined Accenture in 2013, Adaptive Path joined Capital One in 2014, and Teehan+Lax’s core team moved to Facebook in late 2014. iA turned down any offers, both for the agency, and for the product. No to selling the team, no to selling our apps, no to venture capital. What did we do instead? We doubled down on our product, while building out our relationships with Japanese clients.

9th: Light and Darkness

In 2013, we worked with The Guardian, Red Bull, and Freitag. 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

2012 is represented by mix of different waves darkly blending into the curtain of Twin Peak’s Red Room. It illustrates how murderish the time after 3/11 felt to us.

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. David Lynch, the creator of Twin Peaks, passed away in 2025. He was a master of finding beauty in darkness. 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.

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 was a black day in a black year, and 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.

A lovely present from Japan

Are you looking for Christmas shopping ideas? The new iA Notebook inspires careful writing and makes a thoughtful gift.

Who wrote this? Did I or ChatGPT? What if you could see it at a glance? With iA Writer you can. It clearly separates generated text from human authors.

Don’t hide what you have written with AI. Challenge it. Improve it. Write over it. To do that, you need to see what’s yours and what isn’t. iA Writer now makes that obvious. It marks, tracks, and spots AI-generated text.

We’ve had AI tracking for two years,¹ but the dimmed grey tone was too quiet.² It didn’t show what it was or what it was for. And it didn’t signal the urgency to think for yourself. It could be easily overlooked. This urgency needs to be made obvious and invite us to feel, think and say what we really mean.

Decoding the New Colors

We took a page from the AI playbook and used the visual language everyone already recognizes for generated text: the rainbow.

AI in Rainbows

Generated text now bursts onto the page in a rainbow. It looks as artificial as it is. If you proofread with Apple Intelligence or paste text from Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or similar, those parts will show up in color.

Think of it as a game: you got help, now make it your own. Make it better, make it real, let the text speak in your voice. When you return to your document, you’ll immediately see what you wrote, and what you borrowed.

Don’t let the machine speak for you. Let it push you to do better. Don’t just accept what it gives. Improve it. Make it yours.

True Colors: Shakespeare and Your Friends

We’ve improved Authorship for human collaborators, too. When several people work on the same document, each author’s contributions now appear in distinct colors, making contributions instantly clear.

It helps you stay in control of your quotes. Add frequently cited authors, tag their words, and instantly see what’s yours and what’s borrowed, whether it’s from Shakespeare, a colleague, or your favorite comedian.

References Stay Dimmed

Some writers used the dimming effect to mark reference material, for example when adapting boilerplate text or a downloaded contract template. To support authorship with sources where we don’t know the exact authors, iA Writer introduces a new Reference category. Tag boilerplate text as Reference to keep it subtly dimmed while you focus on your own edits.

Paint it Black

When multiple sources, edits, or AI snippets overlap, authorship and Syntax Highlight used together can become challenging.

Use Syntax Highlight when editing. Use Authorship when reviewing. Switch as needed. Syntax Highlight helps you edit. Authorship gives you control over who wrote what.

Use the Focus menu to toggle between them. When revising, stay in Syntax Highlight to polish your prose. When reviewing or merging edits, switch to Authorship to see which passages are yours, which came from collaborators, and which are AI.

Update Today

Authorship is available now in iA Writer for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, on the App Stores. Check our support article on Authorship for more details.

Share the best work you created in 2025. Send us your finest writing or presentation from this year for a chance to win an iA Notebook.

The iA Awards are back for their second year, now becoming an annual tradition. We want to continue discovering and celebrating great writing and presentations. Show us what you created using our tools.

What we’re looking for

Writing: We accept all non-fiction and fiction, including blog posts, articles, research, academic works, lectures, short stories, novels, poems, song lyrics, and screenplays.

Presentations: A good presentation tells a good story. We’re looking for well-structured, engaging presentations.

In need of inspiration? Take a look at last year’s winners entries: iA Awards 2024.

Awards guidelines

We don’t expect you to have used iA Writer or iA Presenter exclusively. On the contrary, we love Markdown precisely because it lets you use different tools to get the job done. Just follow these guidelines to make sure that you’re eligible:

• Writing formats: Link to your work, if published. Otherwise text, Markdown, or PDF
• Presentation formats: Link to your work, if published. Otherwise PDF, video, or .iapresenter
• Number of entries: You can send two submissions: one for writing and another for a presentation
• Language: English

When and where

Submissions are open until 30 December 2025. Both winners will be announced in January 2026.

Send your submissions to awards@ia.net. You’re welcome to include links to your site or social media profile, which we’ll publish with the winning entries.

We look forward to reading your work!

iA Notebook has found many fans in the U.S., so we made it easier to get. You can now get the iA Notebook both online and in select stores across the country, including SF MoMA in San Francisco.

Your Notebook now ships from within the United States. That means faster delivery, and shipping included in the lower 48, no import steps for you. If you purchase three or more notebooks you get a discount, too.

You’d like to see and feel the notebook first? It is now on display at stores across the United States:

• SF MoMA San Francisco, CA
• The OK Store Los Angeles, CA
• Flax Pen to Paper Los Angeles, CA
• J Horton Madison, CT
• Two Hands Paperie Boulder, CO
• Bella Cucina Atlanta, GA
• Nantucket Bookworks Nantucket, MA

We added more stores in Switzerland, too. You can find iA Notebook at:

• Fondation Beyeler Museum Riehen
• Kunstmuseum Basel Basel
• museum rietberg Zürich
• einzigart Zürich
• TOKORO Zürich
• ELONI Zürich
• Büro Schoch Winterthur
• Agathe Nisple St. Gallen
• Boutique Balthazar Vevey
• Catambo Nyon
• L’Écritoire design Lausanne

More stores are coming. In Japan, it will be available at Tsutaya T-SITE Daikanyama, from November 1st until November 13th. Our store locator will always have an up-to-date list. Contact us if you are interested in selling it at your store.

Better accessibility

While our watermarked lines are a feat of design and engineering, everyone’s vision is different, and the lines can be difficult to see in certain lighting conditions.

Every Notebook now comes with a Shitajiki (writing board). Inspired by traditional Japanese writing boards, it not only makes the watermarked lines easier to see, but also provides a stable writing surface, reduces ghosting on the opposing page, prevents pages underneath from pressure marks, and helps prevent ink bleed-through.

Get it here

Customers in the contiguous United States can grab iA Notebook from our new shop at store-us.ia.net. If you’re elsewhere in the world, you’ll also get our new writing board with every purchase from store.ia.net.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Apple has unveiled a bold new design language for all its operating systems. It’s still too early to say how good or bad it is, but we can outline the challenges.

It looks fresh, dynamic, and (very) on-brand. The fact that iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS now all follow the same UI patterns is good news, and we can only imagine how hard it was to coordinate and push through in a huge organization like Apple.

First Impressions

As expected, Apple’s announcement triggered the usual flood of sarcasm and glee online. Of course, it’s not all bad. Some of the world’s best designers worked on this… and designers, being human, make mistakes.

The backlash after Apple launches something new has become tradition. It’s as loud as it is predictable, and the insight you get from first reactions on Social Media is as meaningful as any carnival music.

Let’s be honest: Liquid Glass isn’t a great name. But the concept is bold, the animations feel fresh, and apps still using the previous look already seem a step behind.

More importantly, this shift isn’t just cosmetic. It’s the first time Apple has introduced a truly unified design across all platforms. UI elements render live and morph with context. That’s not just aesthetic polish. It’s systemic change.

The Metaphor

As a metaphor, glass is consistent and logical on iPhone, a device made of glass with limited surface area. No matter the model, space is always tight.

Glass works similarly on iPad, where the interface is also defined by touching a glass screen. But it’s arguably less necessary here, since the iPad has, broadly speaking, enough space for simultaneous UI.

Remember Aqua, Apple’s major OS redesign from 25 years ago? Aqua means “water,” which acts like a form of “liquid glass.” So while there are roots going back decades, which is nice, that history makes Liquid Glass feel less fresh and a little less convincing on macOS, which otherwise has just become a lot rounder.

Where Liquid Glass Works… and Where It Doesn’t

Looking at Liquid Glass on macOS raises the question of whether transparency should be limited to contexts where it clearly improves the experience. Liquid Glass seems helpful on smaller devices. On iPad and macOS, it may make sense in situations where:

1. There is limited space or UI elements get in the way
2. Controls appear on time-limited UI elements where readability isn’t a concern, like media player controls
3. Transparency improves clarity; like play buttons on videos, contextual menus on photos, or secondary text

Moving forward, Apple might consider keeping the full-on glass effect time-limited. Visual effects have the most impact when used sparingly. Think of the spectacular Siri wave or Apple Intelligence animations. They surprise and delight precisely because they appear and vanish.

The Laocoön-effect

Liquid Glass may suffer from a Laocoön effect:¹ According to Lessing, dynamic action forced into a static medium distorts or diminishes the intended expression. Glass is a static material, and animating glass is inaccurate.

But it looks great…like the Siri wave or Apple Intelligence effects. What’s not to like? Mind you, good design is not primarily about aesthetics. The question is whether Liquid Glass works.

Readability is a concern. So is energy consumption. And visually, the overall look feels blurred. Some quick app icon renders appear smudged: a surprising waste on such a crisp screen. Maybe it just takes some getting used to, but the icons are neither circles nor squares, which gives them an odd, undecided feel.

In fact, the first iteration didn’t work too well. Too much effect, not enough function. So they toned it down. Does it work now? Or is it still trying to be something it’s not?²

“Desire lacking ability turns to Kitsch.” —Jan Tschichold³

So this is the ultimate dare for a company known for world-class design. Liquid Glass: does it work, or is it kitsch?

Potential

Glass as an Extension of the Device

Using glass as an extension of the screen makes sense. It might be more convincing if glass elements didn’t float independently below the surface, made of glass. But they worked with the surface. If the glass we interact with was working with the glass we touch. Like the fake click effect, some UI elements could be rendered to feel like a dynamic indentation on the surface you touch.

Imagine a form field that looks and feels like your phone’s screen has a real indent. If the glass effect is tied directly to the surface interaction, the animation would feel consistent… and the Laocoön-effect wouldn’t be a concern.

Design or Kitsch?

So, is it design or kitsch? The first beta leaned toward the kitschy side. It didn’t quite work. Right now, it’s somewhere in between, but heading in the right direction. The better it works, the less it’s just effect, the more it becomes design.

We’re excited about the unified design, optimistic that Apple will fix any technical issues, and eager to update our apps to work with the new OSes. But we will take our time. It requires much more than just reskinning our apps. The keyboard extension, for example, need some deep rethinking. And… we’re working on other things right now that we need to finish first.

Lifestyle Week Tokyo is one of Japan’s largest trade fairs, drawing over 40,000 professionals across eleven exhibitions, from homeware and fashion to sustainable goods and stationery. We came to test something specific: how the iA Notebook would resonate in the country where it was designed, built, and now awarded.

Internationally, the response has been strong. We sold out batch after batch. And we had already won the Red Dot Best of Best Award. What more could we want? To us, it was still somewhat theoretical. We wanted to experience how people reacted when they saw it. What they thought, what they felt, we wanted to see their facial expressions evolve as they learned about it and as they used it.

First Reactions

Japan sets the bar very high for paper goods. It’s home to the most discerning stationery audience in the world. On top of that, we would talk to one of the most critical crowds imaginable: distributors and big Japanese chain vendors. So we were also a bit nervous. Would they find flaws? Would they find those we knew about? Would they find some we didn’t know about?

From the moment the fair opened, visitors lined up at our small stand. They didn’t just glance, they approached, talked, and wrote. They tested the paper, flipped through it, examined every detail, asked sharp questions, and brought back colleagues. The most common reaction after seeing the optical effect was: “Eeeeeh, sugoooooi.”

2025 Japan Stationery of the Year ISOT Award

Then the news broke: the iA Notebook had won the 2025 Japan Stationery of the Year ISOT Award (第34回日本文具大賞) in the Design category.

This marks our third major design recognition this year, alongside the Red Dot: Best of the Best and our place as a finalist for Apple’s 2025 Design Awards. Germany, California, Tokyo, three very different cultures, one shared appreciation: focus, clarity, and craft. People started queuing up at our stand.

Like Winning Sushi of the Year

What made this one special was where it happened. Japan has a deep culture of paper and stationery. Of course, we knew we could produce a great notebook here. If you make sushi in Japan, you have to start at a higher level than in Switzerland. But you also subject yourself to far tougher scrutiny.

Letting Japanese grade your sushi rice is a chilling prospect. Winning here, judged by experts and shown alongside some of Japan’s most refined designs, felt like waking up from a nice dream into a sunny morning.

Among the many visitors was Japan’s legendary “stationery king” (yes, he exists), who shared generous and thoughtful feedback. Teams of buyers took photos from every angle, making us almost as nervous as the camera shutter. Distributors from China, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, and the U.S. showed strong interest.

What started as a small internal project, a response to customers asking for a simple “iA” t-shirt, has turned into something much bigger. What began as a quiet present has become a lasting presence.

After 15 years in the App Store, iA Writer is a finalist for an Apple Design Award. That’s amazing for two reasons.

Obviously, it’s amazing to be picked among millions of apps and hundreds of thousands of developers no matter what. But getting picked after 15 years is unusual and meaningful.

As a common notion, design is tied to novelty. If it’s not new, it’s not exciting. If it’s not exciting it’s not “design”. So design awards usually go to what’s new. But here’s the paradox: The only way to tell if a design is really good is if it stands the test of time. So getting picked after 15 years is good news for good design. For ideas that hold up. For products built to last.

Design award usually means new, but…

Creating something innovative, simple, functional, and joyful once is hard. Maintaining that standard—over 15 years and 1,745 updates—is even harder. It takes restraint. Patience. Care.

That’s why this nomination means something different than it would have meant 15 years ago. An app launched in 2010 is being recognized in 2025 for setting the standard. Whether it wins gold, silver, or just a handshake—we celebrate this as a win for true, lasting quality and dedication.

Imagine, if design awards would only be given out if a product’s design has proven itself for over 15 years… The industry doesn’t work like that, but in terms of sustainability and true quality, it would raise the bar. The recognition you get after 15 years of dedication is truly earned.

1.0 was packed with innovation

iA Writer launched in 2010 with a single idea: a writing app that gets out of the way. No tabs. No toolbars. No chrome. No settings. Just you, your words, an easy-to-spot cursor of full focus. That sounds obvious now. It wasn’t then. We built a lot that didn’t exist:

• Reading time: now everywhere from Medium to Kindle
• Focus Mode: since copied badly by many, most notably Microsoft
• Keyboard extension: back when keyboard extensions didn’t extend
• On Mac, a colorful, wider magnetic cursor: long before Apple added color cursors
• On Mac, we hid the title bar when you typed; inspired by QuickTime, still a signature feature
• No settings: we wish that we could still do that, but no settings only works up to about 50,000 users

We were early. So early, that we had no other choice than to print out the first designs at 1:1 scale with an iPad frame. There were simply no iPads available in March 2010.

We launched in September 2010. But we didn’t stop there. We couldn’t. But we had to pay attention to not go down the path of most apps.

Evolving without feature creep

Apps keep adding features, because, like it or not, new features get new attention and more attention sells more. If you keep adding features, your app becomes bloated, farty, buggy, and slow. Shiny features will distract, and eventually completely destroy the focus of the user and the focus of your app. Most successful apps are headed for the eventual feature heat death. We tried to get around the issue by adding features that offered more, not less focus:

• Responsive typography with custom fonts that adjust across screen sizes, weights, and columns.
• Syntax Highlight and Style Check to help you see—not just read—your writing.
• Authorship: An AI feature that doesn’t write for you, but keeps track of what you wrote and what you pasted. (We think that machines should serve people, not the other way around).

Good design lasts

Apps age. Trends change. New tech changes the game. How do you stay consistent without going stale? It takes more than a good idea and skills. It takes character. Restraint. Nerves.

We’re proud to be a finalist. We are proud of our work, with or without a medal. But, just as with the Red Dot Best of the Best Award we won this year, we’d be lying if we said that we didn’t care. We care. And when that care gets noticed, we feel recognized. And that touches us.

We care

When you keep taking care of your product—against trends, against the flattening boredom of AI-everywhere, against the push to monetize every fart with a subscription, against the constant pressure for “just one more feature,” and yes, even against Apple itself—it feels miraculous to get recognition for all the time and thought we put into our product.

You don’t need a trophy to know your work is worth it. People using your product will tell you loud and clear. But after 15 years of saying “no” more than “yes,” staying focused, staying true, staying honest—this nomination hits deep.

Thank you, Apple. This feels good. And congratulations to all the nominees and winners. It’s a pleasure to be in your company.

WWDC25

We’ll be at WWDC25. If you’d like to say hi, send us an email.

Over the years, the designer behind the colorful iMacs, the iPhone, and the Apple Watch has come to sound more and more like a reincarnation of Aristotle. At Apple his discourse on form, essence and matter read as high-concept marketing. But bit by bit, step by step, it started to feel almost like the opposite.

His 2021 CCA Commencement Address felt like a genuine meditation on design.¹ Last week, at a PR-event for an Multibillion e-commerce platform, no less, he gave what amounted to a masterclass in design philosophy. In the span of an hour, Sir Jony Ive echoed Plato, Aristotle, and Wittgenstein, with clarity, grace and humility.²

So you start to wonder: is old school philosophy, “love for wisdom”, the secret sauce of his new company, LoveFrom? Or does philosophy find us when we’re really, really serious about what we do? Or did he just get better at high-concept marketing?

Making and Being

We are what we make

Design and Philosophy connect through Maker’s Knowledge.³ If philosophers tried to design, they’d communicate more clearly. If designers studied philosophy, they’d understand better what it is that they do.

Giambattista Vico built that bridge from the thinking side. He stated that we only truly know what we make ourselves.⁴ Jony Ive builds it from the making side. For him, what we create reveals who we are.

“What we make stands testament to who we are.”⁵

According to Vico, we understand the world by creating and re-creating it. According to Ive, what we create shows who we truly are. He added that what is most revealing about who we are is “what we do when no one sees.”

“It’s what we do when no one sees, and […] I think that[…] it’s […] a powerful marker of who we truly are”⁶

Knowing through making and knowing who we are through what we make are not the same thought. But they’re delightfully linked. We learn by creating, and we, as Nietzsche would say, “become who we are” through what we create.

A maker of tools

Ive may speak like a philosopher, but he sees himself as a simpler man: “I’m just Jony.” he says at the very end.⁷ Sir Ive is in fact “just Jony”, one of the carpenters, shoemakers, midwives Socrates speaks of:

“…about being toolmakers […] I’m very clear and very proud that that’s my occupation and that’s my practice”⁸

Socrates climbed to the highest heights of philosophy by talking about shoemakers, midwives, and carpenters, in a time when society categorically looked down on people working with their hands.⁹ Jony Ive turned into something like a philosopher by going to the extremes of craft:

“When somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable and they thought “somebody gave a shit about me” I think that’s a spiritual thing”¹⁰

“Giving a shit” as a “spiritual thing”? That sounds like the bold Satyr Socrates.¹¹ If you work in design, you know what he means. “What I am thinking about now becomes a thing, and that thing will make someone I don’t know realize that I thought of them.” It’s a beautiful moment. Here’s the opposite:

“What used to depress me is this sense that ‘solving a functional requirement, [and] then we’re done.’ But, of course, that’s not enough. That’s not […] the characteristic of an evolved society, of an evolved species…”¹²

So, here we learn that Ive is not a utilitarian. He’s Aristotelian though and thorough, equally obsessed with the unity of form, matter, and essence as Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Next, we learn that he is definitely not a positivist.

Measuring Design

Creating careful experiences

And while we don’t know if Ive reads Aristotle in the original, he speaks like a man of high culture. He sees design as a sign of culture and sophistication. And, again, he ignites the light of philosophy when he explains in what sense taking care of what we make is a spiritual matter.

“…the excitement that somebody is going to experience something that they don’t even know exists yet. And even though it was a small thing, it would come from a place of love and care.”¹³

He went pretty far now. So, unsurprisingly, he’s about to let the pendulum swing back to cynicism. He understands the type of power his “love and care” has built at Apple. There’s a painful difference between art and design. Art can do what it wants, it doesn’t have to do anything. Design must obey the logic of economy, the law of numbers, and money. And he doesn’t like it:

“There is this… it used to infuriate me before I came to a more generous interpretation of why this happens. But people generally want to talk about product attributes they can measure easily with a number… […] schedule cost, speed, weight… Anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two. And I understand why…”⁸

Again, design is not art. Design makes things that need to work and make money. Still, well done design thinks long term. Good design is economical for both the company and the consumer. A good product costs more, but lasts longer. That’s common sense. But…

An insidious lie

Sadly, good design stands in harsh contrast to today’s economy of “predetermined breaking points”, which puts shareholder value over customer value. But there’s something else that design provides, something that offers a value that cannot be fully measured.

“…but the problem is that much of my contribution… and the contribution of other creatives, you can’t easily measure with a number.”¹⁴

The most precious matters, health, love, beauty, happiness, and delight, can’t be measured. And while design is an industrial endeavor that cannot break its ties to the often depressing measurable mechanics of the economy, good design can get awfully close to philosophy and art. Good design thinks intelligently, it respects the user, it respects the environment, it thinks ahead, it empowers, changes, and it can bring joy.

“The insidious lie follows which is we spend all our time talking about attributes because we can easily measure them. Therefore this is all that matters And that’s a lie It’s important but it’s a partial truth and all of the stuff that I think designers and other creatives um can contribute to an experience or to a product um that can make it delightful to use and joyful to use as well as more productive Um if it’s delightful and joyful things tend to be used more”¹⁵

To make delightful and joyful products in spite of the economic reality and the industry’s insane obsession with numbers, it seems like designers need to be at least somewhat subversive.

Words matter, opinions don’t

The following quote speaks volumes about the ongoing struggle of a passionate designer struggling with the economic reality. Few things are as frustrating as arguing with people who only believe in numbers. Ive knows the situation all too well:

“Or it gets even more demeaning, it can be just ‘well that’s your opinion.’ Try telling your heart surgeon, ‘Well, that’s your opinion,’ and you having a go yourself.”¹⁶

Designers are not heart surgeons, but the more experienced we move closer and closer to what philosophers would be, if they had to earn a salary in the industry.

“I know we both care about the words we use because they affect the way we think. And the words that we use to frame a problem are some of the most important.”¹⁷

Like a 21st century Wittgenstein, he says something along the lines of “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”. And then, in chess notation, he deserves three exclamation marks for pointing out how important and delicate the words are that we use to frame a problem. Because if we frame it only so slightly wrong, we can’t really solve it.

Design and Time

Beautiful efficiency

Sir Jony Ive earns another exclamation point for his concession to efficiency:

“…it’s hard to do quality and speed and cost and other things, but um I think I think there is a beauty to working efficiently”¹⁸

There’s a lot to unpack here: Design takes time. Always. There simply is no fast, good design. It always takes a lot of time to make things that save others even more time. And that’s the beauty of good design. We invest a lot of time in saving others even more time. Over time, as we change things, we have change as well, we have to.

Design shouldn’t be rushed. “There’s a beauty” in making efficient tools that allow us to work efficiently. And there’s a meta-beauty to having an efficient process for making those efficient tools.

Change is painful

In a typical design process, often, we end up doing what we initially sketched. Exploring all the options through the full design process, we understand better what we do and come back to the initial approach. We do what we initially did, but on a higher level, with a deeper understanding. We can’t just always take the first sketch, because we need to know what we do by exploring all options. Most designers would agree that often we end like we finish, just more mature. Most definitely, Ive has had this experience more than once. But he says, somewhat surprisingly:

“I do believe that we go through chapters and seasons, and the painful part is the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next, where we have to adjust and we change our approach. What doesn’t work is that we assume that how we start is how we’re gonna finish.”¹⁹

Here, he is not talking about that very common paradox that we end up doing what we initially sketched out. Design changes society. And as society changes, we need to change to continue to do good work. And this process can be very painful. Especially if your design has influenced the world in an unforeseen negative way.

“I think we have to be very clear that we’re in a constant state of flux….”²⁰

Heraclitus famously said: “Everything flows,” and “We cannot step twice into the same river.” Ive quickly moves from Heraclitus to Kant’s Critique of the Practical Reason:

The Importance of Values

No compromises on principles and values

“What we’re not gonna compromise [is][…] the very clear focus on your principles and your values and your motivations.”²¹

And while there’s some Ethics of Duty packed in there, his Deontological tone echos from a far far distance from the very measurable monetary reality he helped build at Apple. Which moves his inner cynic to a slow early morning yawn:

“I think the alarm bells always go off for me when I think ‘Why did I do that? Has a [my?] motivation shifted?’ and that’s when I’ve […] really been upset with myself and disappointed with myself…²²

Self awereness

Again, you can clearly see just how much his philosophical mind struggles with the economic reality. You can read the fights with Tim Cook between the lines. One can easily imagine how much the design philosopher Ive struggled in a numbers-dominated Apple.

“if […] our motivations and values remain the same we will find ways to be the control freaks we were born to be, or, of course, we can say ‘care’ care as much as we [should?]… but let’s be honest…”²³

In other words: A great designer is a control freak who pretends that he cares. Point is: Ive has humor and he’s self-aware, and he is definitely not a fan of a numbers-only approach.

On Ideas

Imagination

In a different context, Ive previously said that “Without imagination, without profoundly new thinking and potent ideas, our practice has no purpose.”²⁴

Science needs art as much as art needs science.²⁵ You can’t do science without creativity, and you can’t produce art without science. Despising the worldview that only acknowledges what can be measured, weighed and counted, Ive embraces Plato, by praising the “idea” in the highest of tones:

“If you’re dealing with concepts that can’t be measured with numbers, if you’re dealing with ideas that always, if you think about the evolution of an idea, it always starts off as a thought.”²⁶

The Platonic, the Artistotelic and the Ivean idea

Why is Ive so excited about ideas? Ideas seem to be the most precious spiritual goods. What ideas is he referring to? Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideas. As a designer and maker, Ive likely thinks more in Aristotle’s terms, seeing the idea as the complete unity of form, function, and matter. According to Aristotle, the idea is “what a real thing really is”. Which is fundamentally different from Plato’s idea: a perfectly ideal super entity up in the sky above us.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Ive still sounds a bit more like Plato—especially when he then ties his notion of the idea to “maieutic dialectics” (I know how freaky that sounds…), the method of uncovering the truth by going back and forth in a dialogue.

“And then a, you know, and then a tentative discussion… one of the things I realized is just how you know these ethereal thoughts these fragile concepts, are precarious.”²⁷

“Ethereal thoughts.” Definitely Plato over Aristotle, here. So what’s up with Ive’s idea? Let’s check his 2021 CCA Commencement Honorary Doctorate Address, where he explains the Ivean Notion of the Idea in Design:

“Ideas by definition are always fragile. If they were resolved, they wouldn’t be ideas. They would be products that were ready to ship. I’ve come to learn that you have to make an extraordinary effort not to focus on the problems which are implicated with any new idea. These problems are known. They’re quantifiable and understood. But you have to focus on the actual idea which is partial, tentative, and unproven. If you don’t actively suspend your disbelief, if you don’t believe there is a solution to the problems, of course, you will lose faith in your idea. That is why criticism and focusing on the problems can be so damaging, particularly in the absence of a constructive idea. Remember, opinions are not ideas. Opinions are not as important as ideas. Opinions are just opinions.”

An idea seems to be a delicate key that locks or unlocks a designer’s core belief. The belief that “there is a solution.” He repeatedly states that opinions are not ideas. Opinions enemies, dangers, mere opinions. They need to be held at a distance.

Working Culture

The “danger of actually listening”

One of the most delightful parts of the interview is where Ive speaks about working culture:

“I think a small team of people that really trust each other is […] fundamentally important… that trust each other, that care about each other. If you care about, you know, then you might be in danger of actually listening.”²⁸

Epicure puts it this way: “Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.” Employees are neither friends nor family. They get paid, they can get in irreparable trouble with each other, and they can get fired. But we do work better in a friendly, humane, trusting way than in cut-throat competition. And, with that, we cut back to Plato’s praise of the idea:

What kills ideas

“…what kills most ideas [is] people [that are] desperate to express an opinion, and, really, let’s be very clear, opinions aren’t ideas.²⁹ I was gonna say something really rude then, but I won’t.”³⁰

Oh, please, Socrates, let us hear that cheeky insult. Was it also about pubescent boys?³¹ And again, Ive gets very emphatic talking about ideas:

“One thing that terrifies me: I know that I’ve missed ideas that came from a quiet place from a quiet person, and that really scares me cause I don’t know what I’ve missed.”³²

Now we know why the Magic Mouse has its charging port on the bottom: the designer who proposed placing it at the front was not overruled, but super introverted.

“This nagging feeling in my tummy”

There’s a lot more, like the excitement of modernism over materials, and all the bent tubes, AI, and what he might be up to next, because there is some overlap with what we do at iA…³³ But let’s finish with the full context with this initially quoted pearl:

“a great cabinet maker finishes the back of a drawer even though it’s unlikely it will be seen. [..] In the same way, I think a mark of how evolved we are as people is what we do when no one sees. And […] it’s a powerful marker of who we truly are. […] I would be haunted […] if all we did was the outside[…] I would have this nagging feeling in my tummy that we were just being superficial.”³⁴

Conclusion

Jony Ive’s words walk like philosophy, talk like philosophy, and think like philosophy. Whether his ideas were shaped by long nights in the workshop or long days with a bookshelf, they mirror Vico’s Maker’s Knowledge, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Kant’s ethics, Wittgenstein’s language philosophy, and Epicurus’ quiet friendships. If it’s sales or genuine philosophy or both remains to be seen.³⁵

Does Ives read philosophy? We could speculate all day. Or we could just ask him. Not easy, because there’s no way to contact information available.

Footnotes

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico wrote that we only truly know what we make ourselves. His concept of Verum Factum, known in English as “Maker’s Knowledge,” seems obvious—yet its implications for both design and philosophy are profound.

At first, Vico’s idea might seem obvious: to truly understand something, we need to make it ourselves. But taken seriously, it calls for a fundamental shift in how we learn, teach, think, and create.

For designers and developers Maker’s Knowledge means more than abandoning the division of labor—it means learning to think carefully, philosophically. For philosophers, it means learning to actively design and build. Here’s how we’ll unfold the argument:

1. In the first part, we explore what Maker’s Knowledge means by:

   1. Translating Vico’s original formulation
   2. Examining how making something deepens understanding
   3. Analyzing the normal madness of learning without making

2. In the second part, we examine the relationship between philosophy and design:

   1. Highlighting the arbitrary split between theory and practice
   2. Discussing the value of philosophical training for designers
   3. Considering how design skills could benefit philosophers

3. We close with a summary, the motivation behind this article, and a brief outlook.

1. What is Maker’s Knowledge?

The basic concept of Maker’s Knowledge was first formulated by Giambattista Vico in De Antiquissima Sapientia¹. While related ideas appear in modern Constructive Realism and the philosophy of science, Vico’s core insight has long remained on the margins of mainstream philosophy—especially outside Italy.² Today, in the age of large language models and generative AI, his philosophy offers a crucial insight: true understanding arises not from language patterns, but from physical making.

We get to know things not by reading or hearing about them, not by observing and studying them, but by creating or recreating them with our own hands. At first, his strikingly simple claim, often also referred to as Verum Factum, sounds like nothing new. It seems common sense. And, indeed, in its most basic form, it is generally accepted: theory is nothing without practice. Experience trumps mere words.

And yet, Vico takes a much more radical approach than the mainstream pledge for practical knowledge. Maker’s Knowledge claims that true learning and understanding require physical making. Without using our hands to create what we want to understand we do not properly comprehend what we read or hear. He means this in a very literal way. To understand bread you need to make bread. To understand a bicycle, you need to build a bicycle. To understand philosophy you need to create philosophy.

Experienced designers often apply Maker’s Knowledge intuitively, without realizing it. And while technically, it has been around for over 300 years, it is still a rare gem in the history of philosophical ideas. If you are either a designer or if you study philosophy it deserves your full attention, because it can help you unlock both through each other. The concept of Maker’s Knowledge connects thinking and making, philosophy and design.

1.1 Verum Factum

Giambattista Vico claims that fully understanding an object means knowing from first experience how it was made. He claims that we only fully understand what we make with our own hands. Not just thinking, but making and thinking are required to fully know what something is. Truly realizing what an artifact is requires that we know how it was made. That we realize it with our hands and with our minds. To understand it, we need to create or recreate it. Truth is the realization of a design, or, as Vico said:

“Verum esse ipsum factum.”³

The translation is a tough nut to crack. If we translate it literally, something seems to be missing.⁴ Coincidentally, it turns out that we need to recreate the sentence in our own language to understand its true meaning: To fully understand the sentence we need to recreate it:

“Truth itself is created.”⁵

In Aristotle’s terms⁶ we could say that in order to understand the matter, form, structure, and purpose of a human-made product, we need to either have created or recreate it as close as possible to how it was made.⁷

1.2 To Understand a Thing, Make It

In an interview entitled Do you enjoy being Evil, the German writer Thomas Bernhard claims that reading other author’s books he cares more about how they are made rather than what they say.

“How something is done is what has always interested me most. And strangely, I hardly ever cared what was said there.” –Thomas Bernhard, Do You Enjoy Being Evil?

And indeed, it seems that the more confident we become in our craft, the more we care not about what others do in our field, but how it is done. When we look at a design as designers, we want to know how it was created. We want to know what its makers thought as they worked on it, what materials they used, and how exactly they put it together. As a professional, it gets increasingly interesting to look at things through the glasses of Maker’s Knowledge. Finding out how things are made is an engaging and fun way to learn.

This shouldn’t be too controversial. You don’t need to be an experienced professional to grasp the appeal of Maker’s Knowledge. In everyday life, we are all familiar with its core idea: Most of us prefer learning by doing over reading the manual first. Naturally, we use our hands to understand a new product. We all agree that we do think and better if we alternate between the two.

“Verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur.”

“The true and the made are convertible into each other.”

Unfortunately, in academic philosophy, Maker’s Knowledge is more of a sidetrack than a main street. Academic philosophy is mostly focused on reading and writing.⁸ And while hands are involved in reading and writing, reading and writing it’s not exactly the most practical activity. It’s not that philosophers wouldn’t know better:

“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”–Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: “This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice”

And yet, Western philosophy keeps getting more and more abstract, falling into the rabbit hole of writing about writing. And they are not the only ones. The ancient disregard for working with our hands has not only sabotaged academic philosophy. It’s a core issue undermining modern education, that we believe that we can learn by sitting still, shutting up, listening, and repeating what we are told.

1.3 The Normal Madness of Learning Without Making

How come we separate school and business, work and fun, theory and practice, code and design, UX and analytics, learning and doing? It starts early: The way most schools usually teach and learn runs counter to Maker’s Knowledge. At school, we rarely use our hands to comprehend and reconstruct what we are being told. We sit and listen, read and write—a very limited use of making.

Separating theory and practice to a point where we tell our kids to sit still for twenty years to listen and repeat theory before using their own hands… seems nothing short of wrong.

The way we teach knowledge is removed from reality. We learn better by doing, yet schools rarely reflect that. If education were more hands-on, fewer kids would check out—mentally or physically. This early split between theory and practice grows into a lasting divide between thinking and making.

2. Philosophy and Design

2.1 The Arbitrary Separation of Theory and Practice

There is no design without thought.⁹ Thought without action is meaningless. Every time we try to separate making and thinking we fail at either. Matter and structure — in design, philosophy, and science — take shape when we move back and forth between thought and action.

2.2 Philosophy for Designers

In many ways, classic philosophy is a great school for designers. Studying philosophy does help us do a better job as designers. Philosophy teaches us to think systematically from different perspectives. Creating new, useful products for different people requires learning to “think different”.

Great designers like Dieter Rams, Jony Ive and Jef Raskin speak a philosophical language:

“people generally want to talk about product attributes they can measure easily with a number.[…] schedule cost, speed weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two. And I understand why, but the problem is that much of my contribution, and the contribution of other creatives, you can’t easily measure with a number.”–Jony Ive¹⁰

““The way that you accomplish tasks with a product—what you do and how it responds—that’s the interface.”–Jef Raskin

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”–Dieter Rams

This material may be protected by copyright..”–Jony Ive¹⁰

Maker’s Knowledge implies that we can only do well what we understand. And indeed, creating a good design is a process of understanding. The better we understand what we create, the better our design of the product. It seems like the design disappears and becomes the product once we fully comprehend it.

Looking back over 20 years of working in design at our own design studio, the practice of philosophy created, defined, and shaped what we made as designers. Not just Vico, but Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Kant and Blumenberg and Floridi helped shaping our products. At the same time, using our hands simplified some of the more intricate philosophical concepts that were hard to grasp from just reading and dicussing philosophy.

2.3 Design for Philosophers

Maker’s Knowledge is a bridge between philosophy and design that can be crossed in two directions. In the same way that philosophy helps designers, design can help philosophy.

If philosophers learned to make fonts, draw, paint, and print, take more care that what they say makes sense—not just to themselves but to those they want to reach. That means: Creating and recreating a concept until it takes a clear form—shaping and reshaping until matter, form, and structure become one. Not just practice writing that references other writing but using their bodies to find out what their concepts really mean hands on.

Imagine philosophers getting in touch with those who do what philosophers think. Imagine philosophers who try recreating what they think and speak and write about. Try designing before writing about design. Imagine philosophers thinking about whom they want to reach and why, and discovering an audience they could move to change what bothers them. Imagine philosophers testing their thinking with those whom they want to reach.

Imagine philosophers doing what they think may work… until they really understand… until they understand what they are saying… until they understand their own notions… until they understand because they know how and why… because they know how and why what the object of their thought was made. Imagine philosophical works that are so engaging that the audience itself again wants to know how they were made to the point where, again, they try recreating them. Imagine a philosophical book (or maybe, finally, it’s not a book but something significantly different), so well made that we care more about its making than its message—and discover its essence through its making!

Philosophers don’t need to become Dieter Rams. Dieter Rams doesn’t need to speak like Michel Foucault. They come from different sides and as they progress they walk towards each other. Eventually they meet:

“What we make is testament to who we are.”–Jony Ive¹¹

If philosophers had a better understanding of design, they would create works that not just philosophers love and care about. Imagine a philosophical book that is so clear and insightful that we are more interested in how it was made than what it says.

3. Conclusion

Summary

Maker’s Knowledge invites us to rethink what it means to understand — not as the passive reception of truths, but as the active, structured process of making them. Giambattista Vico’s insight that truth is made remains one of the most powerful and overlooked bridges between philosophy and design.

For design, it affirms that thinking is not separate from doing: to design well is to think clearly through form, function, material, and use. Every design decision is a philosophical proposition in concrete form. Without understanding, there is no good design — and without making, there is no real understanding.

For philosophy, Maker’s Knowledge is a reminder that ideas don’t just live in language. If philosophy is to remain relevant, it must care not just about what it says, but how what it says is made — and how it can be understood by others through form. When philosophers learn to shape, to test, to revise ideas materially, their thinking becomes sharper, more accountable, and more alive.

In the age of AI, language models, and increasingly abstract systems, Vico’s principle cuts through the noise: We do not truly know what we have not made. If designers want to think better, and philosophers want to be understood, both must cross the bridge — and meet in the practice of thoughtful making. If we want to understand, we must build. Philosophy and design meet not in theory—but in thoughtful, tangible creation.

* * *

This article was prepared for an upcoming talk by iA founder Oliver Reichenstein on Maker’s Knowledge at Smashing Conference Freiburg. Oliver previously spoke on the topic at Product at Heart and on the Swiss Pioneers Podcast (in German). Slides from last year’s talk are available here. This year’s talk will explore how philosophy has shaped iA’s work over the past 20 years. Expect to hear much more on the topic of Maker’s Knowledge throughout the year.

Footnotes

Tokyo, the birthplace of iA, has always been a quiet engine behind our work. Its trains, in particular, offer something rare: calm, clarity, and momentum. Sitting on a Tokyo train, you don’t need to do anything—you just move forward. It’s the perfect mindset for writing.

That’s why we created Tokyo Focus Tracks—a series of ambient soundscapes inspired by train lines across the city. Designed to help you focus, they create a sonic space that clears your mind and keeps your fingers moving.

1. Keihin Tohoku Line

The Keihin–Tōhoku Line stretches from Ōmiya in Saitama Prefecture through central Tokyo down to Ōfuna in Kanagawa Prefecture, connecting major cities like Saitama, Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. With 36 stations, it’s one of Tokyo’s busiest commuter lines, serving nearly 3 million passengers daily. The line’s name is derived from the characters for Tokyo (東京), Yokohama (横浜), and the Tōhoku Main Line (東北本線)

2. Yamanote Line

The Yamanote Line is Tokyo’s iconic loop line, encircling the city’s central districts and connecting major hubs like Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, and Tokyo Station. With 30 stations over 34.5 km, a complete loop takes about an hour.

3. Narita Sky Access

The Narita Sky Access Line connects Narita International Airport to central Tokyo, offering a swift journey into the heart of the city. Traversing both urban and suburban landscapes, it symbolizes transitions and new beginnings.

Each Tokyo Focus Track is designed to fade into the background, allowing your thoughts to take center stage. Use them when you need to concentrate, when the page won’t come alive, or when you seek a steady rhythm to guide your writing.

Why trains and type?

While these tracks are primarily soundscapes, we’ve also ensured they are visually attractive. We zoom into type, highlighting the intricate details of typography. There’s a secret affection among type designers and typographers for trains, and we wanted to celebrate that in our visuals.

We’re just getting started. More journeys through Tokyo’s soundscape are on the way. For now, plug in, press play, and let the city help you find your flow. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated on our latest releases and continue exploring Tokyo’s auditory landscapes with us.

The iA Notebook has just received one of the most prestigious recognitions in design: the Red Dot “Best of the Best” Award for Product Design 2025.

We’re humbled and honored and… No. We’re completely hysterical, pompous and showing off. We’ve earned it. It’s not just a product design award—it’s the crown jewel of product design awards, sought after by the biggest brands in product design, the likes of Apple, Leica, Herman Miller, Braun, and Porsche.

What is the Red Dot award?

Each year, Red Dot honors products that stand out through exceptional design, usability, and innovation. Out of thousands of entries from around the world, only a small number receive the “Best of the Best” distinction, “the highest distinction in the competition, awarded to pioneering designs” (Red Dot). This is the first notebook to win this prestigious award.

The same title has been awarded to the iPhone, the MacBook Pro, the Porsche Taycan, Braun’s minimalist appliances, LG’s OLED TVs, the Nest Thermostat, and the original Apple Watch. Only a small handful of products earn it each year—chosen from thousands around the world.

The story of the iA Notebook

Design principles

Initially, we made the notebook for ourselves. We wanted an equivalent to our focused writing app—something that fades out everything but the text. As the project grew and costs increased, we thought “the perfect notebook” would make an outstanding giveaway and Christmas gift for our clients.

The reaction to the first version of iA Notebook made us think there might be a market for it. Still, we kept going without worrying much about viability, just following our instinct in the hunt for perfection. Bit by bit, we uncovered the design principles that shaped the final product:

1. Material: A notebook made entirely of paper, with the idea that its immaculate white fades with use—naturally revealing the beauty of the work poured into it.
2. Function: Lines that stay visible while writing but effortlessly disappear when rereading.
3. Form: Use classic print and binding techniques, make it all out of paper using embossing and watermarks, and leave all the ink that goes into it to the writer.

If you are familiar with Japanese aesthetics, you’ll discover how our principles mirror three classic Japanese design principles. Finishing the product in Japan, this congruence happened naturally. And, against all odds, it became a commercial product.

Made like a digital product

We first wanted to produce it in Switzerland, exploring the full range of available writing papers. We needed a material that felt good to write on and worked seamlessly with watermarks.

We paid for the paper and each printing iteration. Unfortunately, the Swiss producer got tired of our iterative rounds of prototyping and testing. To us, this process felt normal. This is how we develop our digital products: Prototype, test, and redesign until it works. At some point, the producer just stopped replying to our emails and calls.

Today, our Notebook is used by professional writers and amateurs, journalists, and anyone who values well-made, functional, beautiful writing tools. Often people buy it as a present for their writing friends. This makes us happy since it was conceived as a gift. You can still tell from the care we put into the packaging that it was designed as a gift.

Winning the Red Dot award

What makes it special?

This year, the iA Notebook won the top prize because it rethinks how a notebook should work. Subtle watermarks guide your pen and vanish when you read. The paper adapts to your task. It’s a notebook that respects your thinking process—quietly, elegantly, intelligently. It’s crafted from high-quality materials, built with care, and designed for joy.

We’re honored—and still a little stunned—to see the iA Notebook listed alongside names like the Volvo EX30, Bugaboo Dragonfly, Toyota Prius, Mac Studio, Apple Watch Ultra, Ferrari FXX K, iPad Mini 2022, the max bill MEGA Solar watch, Braun Audio LE Series, BOSE Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, Honda e. It’s crazy to think that we did something in the same line.

How about one of our products meeting the likes of Zeiss ZX1, Porsche 911 Carrera 2011, Google Home 2018, iMacPro 2018, Roland FP90, Apple Watch 2015, 13” MacBook Air, Montblanc M Collection, Sony DSC-RX1RM2, Mercedes AMG GT, Leica T, Ducati Diavel 1260, and the Hasselblad X1D-50? It is crazy? Right?

Did we really earn it?

Looks like it. When you work on something for so long, the idea of what you want becomes more and more concrete. Stronger. Clearer. When we look at it today, we still see things we’d like to improve to get it even closer to that idea. This is typical for designers.

We’re like Achilles and the tortoise—every time we reach our goal, it moves a little further ahead. The difference between the real and the ideal gets tinier and tinier, but to us, it becomes more and more important. At some point, we need to step back and let it be what it is. For us, that point came after ten years.

Looking at it from some distance, it’s great to see how many people contributed to it. It looks and feels simple. And it’s easy to understand. We like how it is made entirely of pleasant material, yet it almost disappears when used.

From a technical point of view, we still get a kick out of using optical illusion as a structural design element. We turned something that seems useless, in fact, detrimental to good design into a functional element that enhances the writer’s focus.

What’s next

This award places the iA Notebook among the best-designed products made last year and it’s the first Red Dot Best of the Best award for a paper notebook. This year, we celebrate 20 years of iA. It’s not the first design prize we have won, but the first for an analog product.

We’re looking forward to picking up our prize in July and meeting with the best product designers worldwide. In the meantime, if you don’t have one already, you can get the notebook in the iA Store.

You can also buy it directly at the the Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Zurich, at Haraiso, and at Brot in Bratislawa. We are currently working on a new bigger batch. Contact us if you’re interested in selling it at your own store.

Year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam. You might not have noticed… But Markdown is growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer. Notes on a revolution in slow motion.

From online tools to native apps, from GitHub to Slack to ChatGPT, bit by bit Markdown is taking over. It’s not a big deal. Hardly anyone has heard the word Markdown. But awareness has increased significantly, especially among younger professionals, students, and AI tool users. Increasingly, it shapes the way we format and share ideas. And that’s fantastic news.

By removing layers of proprietary formatting, it is gradually loosening commercial control over document standards. Most importantly, Markdown frees our thoughts while we write. Markdown helps users concentrate on content rather than appearance, promoting clarity, readability, and thoughtful writing. Qualities that are particularly important at school.

Summary

The shift from proprietary, closed formats to Markdown’s open syntax seems slow, subtle, and mostly hidden. Over time, this mostly technical matter has become surprisingly visible, tangible, and significant. Markdown changes the graphical User Interface, the economics of writing, and ultimately, writing itself. It changes not only the storage but how and what we write.

The slow shift from formats to Markdown is particularly powerful for productivity and educational apps. Emphasizing clear, structured thinking rather than visual decoration, moving from .docx to plain text slowly transforms how we communicate through computers. These are big claims on an ephemeral matter. To clarify in what ways Markdown transforms digital communication, let’s look at the history, economy, the design of traditional formats and how they compare to Markdown:

1. First, we’ll look at formats (1.1) and formatting (1.2), how they are connected, and how they differ from Markdown (1.3).
2. Then, we’ll review the recent history and the economy of formats (2.1). We’ll look at the evolution of Microsoft’s .docx and how it influenced its appearance (2.2) and compare it to a simple Markdown editor (2.3).
3. To fully comprehend the subtle evolution of writing, we need to understand why formats were (and still are) so resilient (3.1), why it took Markdown so long to take its tiny bites out of Word’s big cake, why it is successful with a younger audience (3.2) and why we need to encourage our education system to move from docx to plain text.
4. We’ll close with a subjective call for more Markdown and fewer formats.

1. The interplay between format and formatting

1.1. Format

Formats are structured rules for storing and reopening digital information—examples include .docx, .pptx, and .xls. Historically, Microsoft controlled these proprietary formats, ensuring users remained within their software ecosystem. This control was key to Microsoft’s business strategy. International pressure, especially from the EU, forced Microsoft to publish its specifications and improve interoperability.

Originally, formats like .doc, .ppt, and .xls were proprietary. Only Microsoft software could reliably open, edit, and save them without risk of loss or corruption. In the early 2000s, Microsoft introduced .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx as part of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format. These were technically documented, but not easily interoperable in practice.¹

1.2 Formatting

Formatting describes the visual appearance of content: font sizes, colors, bullet points, alignment, and layouts. Software like Word and PowerPoint emphasize visual elements, often distracting users from focusing on the actual content and its meaning.

Over time, the emphasis on word processing and presentation software has shifted from content creation to an almost obsessive focus on formatting—the visual presentation of text.

This preoccupation mirrors a form of fetishism, where the superficial attributes of a document are revered, often at the expense of the substance within. Users find themselves ensnared in a cycle of selecting fonts, adjusting margins, and tweaking layouts, believing that these elements inherently enhance the quality of their work. This fixation on form over function diverts attention from the core purpose of writing: to communicate ideas clearly and effectively.

1.3 Markdown

Markdown is not a traditional file format or a visual formatting tool. Created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, Markdown is a simple, readable markup language designed to structure plain text effectively. Initially developed as a more user-friendly alternative to writing for the Web, Markdown uses basic characters like hashtags and asterisks to indicate headings, lists, and emphasis.

Markdown has grown increasingly popular as more applications integrate it directly. Its simplicity allows anyone to focus purely on writing clear, structured content.

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. ²

Strictly speaking, Markdown is neither a format nor is it formatting. It’s a syntax for indicating structure (headings, lists, emphasis) in plain text. Some apps use it as a format. They partially or fully hide markup and interpret it visually. Fully hiding or using Markdown as a one-way street undermines it.³ It was not designed to be applied behind the scenes, as it’s not ideal for parsing: to stay readable it doesn’t use easily identifiable opening and closing tags, that support technical parsing.

2. The business of controlled formats

2.1 History

It’s worth noting that Microsoft bought PowerPoint, GitHub, LinkedIn, and many other things—but it did in fact create Word and Excel.⁴ Microsoft is, in essence, a sales company. It’s not too great at designing software. Microsoft strategically enforced its formats through the control over the Windows platform as the de facto standard for productivity apps.

Formats were a core part of its business strategy. The way they used formats to control the way we write may now seem utterly bizarre. At the time it worked like a perfectly oiled machine. Microsoft continuously altered their formats to enforce paid updates and maintain control over the productivity software market. The connection between format and formatting was one of the main factors of its technical gatekeeping. They continuously added formatting features and correspondingly the format was updated. If you wanted to be able to read or share a document with the latest formatting, you needed their latest format—available for another few hundred bucks. For almost three decades they controlled the way we wrote.

Word has layout capabilities, it’s widely understood and marketed as a word processor. Technically, it is geared towards formatting and layouting. And yet, professional journalists, professors, and even poets that don’t care much about fonts, dropcaps and margins, were forced to using it. Not because it’s the best app for writing. Because the university, the editor in chief, the book publisher offers and expects the .docx format. For the most part, the back-and-forth between writer and editor still goes through Word’s Track Changes feature.

2.2 The Evolution of Word

With every update, the focus shifted further away from writing and toward formatting. Using Word, you come to think that writing means choosing fonts. From the beginning, Word uses a proportional, finished font. Instead of thinking about what to say, users were trained to concentrate on how it looks.

From its very first version, Word focused on formatting. With the limited space of an 80’s monitor, they figured that they needed to find a way to make space for multi-windows, rulers, and formatting features like underline, strike-though, and bold. That they managed to have multiple windows with rulers is sort of impressive, given the limited amount of pixels at the time.⁵

Likely, this is how developers saw writing at the time. “Putting words in fancy fonts and make them bold and stuff.” As a professional writer, you probably don’t care much about bold, italics, and underline, while you write. You care about sentence, paragraph, chapter, and outline. Not in a graphic way, but from a grammatical, semantic, and rhetoric perspective.

The introduction of menus freed some space for writing. It didn’t take long for Microsoft to start populating that space with stuff. A damn shame. Developers should have observed and trusted how they write code. An efficient Word processor shares more characteristics with an IDE than with a layout program.

As soon as they could, pictures were added to the editor. Few things are as distracting when you write than colorful pictures. Choosing, editing, and placing the pictures requires talents that don’t have much in common with the talents of a typical writer.

Word found its basic shape around 1990, and since then it kept adding graphical UI and formatting elements around the text. It’s interesting how, for decades, hardly anyone noticed that instead of a word processor, we used a second-class layout app.

Word is geared toward making office workers use their time with bad design decisions. As the screen became bigger they added more and more useless garbage around the text. Buttons, Rulers, Chatbots, and, now AI design assistants.

Few are aware of .docx architecture, and hardly anyone really cares, but to understand a format and its effect we need to look below the surface. Here is what you get when you unzip a .docx document with the words “Hello World”:

Who cares? Who cares how complicated a car engine is, as long the car works? Well, that the car doesn’t work. Data corruption, bugs, and slowness have a lot to do with a bad data structure. In theory, you might not care about the technical architecture behind writing formats. But as a user you will feel their effect.

Though largely hidden, an overly complicated data structure creates all kinds of friction. The growing complexity of over-formatted data has driven a constant growth of design complexity and an explosion of graphical user interface elements. Each new version of the software added more features, making the app harder to understand, heavier, buggier, slower, and less and less compatible.

2.3 The evolution of a Markdown app

For comparison, a quick look at the evolution of the UI of our Markdown-based writing app, iA Writer. While it has gained more features over the past 15 years, its design remains focused on maximizing space for the text.

iA Writer was able to stay the way it is because of Markdown. By not hiding it, we resisted turning it into a format. It’s highly tempting to use Markdown as a format because mobile devices are now fast enough to parse it in real time. Markdown’s inventor, also a user of iA Writer for many years, opposes this step.

Things does Markdown right. It doesn’t hide the Markdown formatting characters, it just styles them. Effectively, the notes field for tasks in Things is still just plain text. It’s just styled nicely if you write that plain text in Markdown. That’s the right way to do Markdown. Don’t hide the formatting characters; just style/color them.⁶

We fundamentally disagree with Gruber in his take on the EU, but we seem to be one heart and one soul when it comes to how Markdown should be displayed:

iA Writer is just beautiful. To me, it’s the gold standard for Markdown syntax styling — great colors, real italic and bold styling for italic and bold spans, and, my very favorite touch, outdented #’s for headings.⁷

Today’s obsession with formatting, the omnipresent productivity theater, and bloated user interfaces are the legacy of Microsoft’s strategic control over document formats. It paid off handsomely for the company—but at the cost of cluttered software and billions of distracted, poorly designed documents that no one wants to read.

3. A revolution in slow motion

3.1 Why commercial formats lasted so long

Everyone still uses Microsoft products—not because they work particularly well. But because we do not have a choice. Word and Office are forced upon us at school, at work, and because their format was expected. Microsoft’s control was total and has just started to soften a little bit, as of late.

Microsoft’s dominance is complete. You can see it in search engines. When people look for writing apps, they search for Word or Office. For most, those names are synonymous with “writing.” Many don’t even know alternatives exist—or how much better they can be.

Trying to reach those users is nearly impossible. Microsoft owns the keywords, the SEO, and the domain names. Competing for visibility becomes a losing battle: they outbid, outrank, and overshadow anyone offering an alternative.

Because Microsoft’s formats were so dominant, every competing product had to offer a degree of compatibility with Microsoft’s half-open formats. You can open .docx in Pages and Google Docs. You can open .ppt in Keynote and Google Slides, and a lot of Markdown apps offer some form of import and export. If you’re incompatible with Office you’re still fighting an uphill battle.

Luckily, those expectations are starting to change. But for almost three decades, the single format of a single company became the arbitrator of how we wrote most of our work. And that format made you focus on visual decisions: margins, line heights, font colors, etc. Over time, .doc (and later .docx) made us conflate content quality with appearance. As a result, documents are judged by how they look rather than what they say. The obsession with formatting was great for Microsoft. Everyone else drew the short straw.

• Word and PowerPoint locked us and everybody into buying the latest versions: because only the latest version will save and display our document reliably.
• Visual formats made us write badly, nudging us into prioritizing surface over structure, appearance over meaning, and wasting billions of hours on formatting instead of thinking about what we wanted to say.
• Commercial formats shaped how we perceive, think, and communicate at the screen: Over time, visual polish became more important than conceptual clarity.

And while they always made us feel uncomfortable, we all resigned to using them because they seemed normal. But like smoking on planes, they were never a rational norm. Office products were and are suffocating. They’re buggy, slow, and produce a uniform, predictable outcome.⁸

3.2 A quiet, cool, slow revolution

Over the years, the format used in writing apps started to change from proprietary .docx to .pages and .pdf to the innocuous syntax called Markdown. Outside the tech field, few are familiar with its name, and yet more and more people use it unknowingly.⁹

Today, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Google Chat, Teams, and Trello, among others, use Markdown syntax, at least partially. Seeing weird characters when you copy-paste from AI? That’s because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others use Markdown to format their responses. GitHub, Reddit, and similar tech-oriented sites have been using their own Markdown flavors for years now.

Even though Markdown syntax varies slightly across platforms, the slow constant spread of Markdown is good news. The more prevalent Markdown becomes, the less the old-fashioned bloated formatting and formats dictate how we write, think, and speak, the more we focus on what we say instead of how things look.

Let’s not get too excited, though. MS Office has nevertheless persisted as a writing app. Not because it’s great for writing. It has been a boring, buggy, and distracting time-waster for decades. PowerPoint is the King-Kong of bad design, thumping his chest for decades. And while all of them are slowly dying, they’re still omnipresent, at work, at home—and at school.

3.3 Markdown at School

School is still completely dominated by old-fashioned formats. In Switzerland, every pupil gets a free Microsoft account. Teachers share their .ppts, pupils send their .docs in. Everything is discussed via Outlook or Teams. Classrooms look like corporate meetings where slides are being shown and explained.

3.3.1 Office at school, school as an office

Why are we sending our kids to a school that looks like a Microsoft ad? To prepare them for the future. Does equipping children with Office tools truly serve this purpose or does it serve the purpose of cementing a life in the products of a software monopolist?

To learn how to read, write, think, and speak, we don’t need Office or any other apps. We need to actually do those things—read, write, think, and speak. To that end, pen and paper do a better job than screens.¹⁰

Writing out the same word again and again in cursive may bring back bad memories for some, but handwriting can boost connectivity across brain regions, some of which are implicated in learning and memory.¹¹

Kids are spending more than enough time in front of screens. The argument, that this prepares them for their future is involuntarily cynical. One month at work is enough to learn Office. We don’t need to teach PowerPoint to kindergärtners.¹²

3.3.2 Focus and Screens

As we all have more and more trouble focusing,¹³ what do we do? We sit our kids in front of screens at school as well. What if, instead, we got rid of all the screens, the buttons, menus, and settings? What if we started focusing on what we think with our minds, say with our mouth, and do with our hands?

We are sending our kids to Office meetings and then we wonder why they don’t feel like spending their whole life at the office. There’s a lot more to say on that, but in short: To make our kids read, write, and present well, to prepare them for the future, Office should get banned from Schools.

3.3.3 Thinking and learning is painful because growing is painful

Learning is painful. Thinking is like sports. You might get into the flow and enjoy it. You might even get a runner’s high. It’s pleasant to keep getting better at it. But, usually, it only feels really great after you’re done with it.

Instead of engaging in genuine thought, writing, and learning, you can now fully embrace the role of an office worker—mastering the art of appearing knowledgeable without true understanding. Finally, you can devote yourself entirely to formatting and the façade of productivity. In fact, with the advent of Copilot, even these tasks can be automated. Your presence is no longer required. The latest iteration of Word completes this descent into the abyss:

Not everybody wants to learn. Microsoft Office works in an office where you pretend to work until you can finally go home. There is no other app that can make you look so busy and serious doing nothing and saying nothing as PowerPoint. It’s a pro tool for creating bullshit.

For young people who want to learn—not pretend to learn—there are better ways than ChatGPT and Office apps. That’s why, in recent years, at universities, tools like Notion, Craft, or iA Writer have earned quite some popularity. A common trait of these newer apps is that they use Markdown to structure text. Many modern writing tools use Markdown instead of docx, ppt, or xls.

4. Conclusion

Markdown is successful with new apps and a younger audience. This is neither a coincidence nor is it by design. Markdown is subversive. Programmers use and understand Markdown, and they implement it in their apps because they’re familiar with it. It’s ironic how developers shaped a writing app as a clunky design app are now freeing us from the basic design flaw that trapped us for over 40 years. Funny also that Markdown with its slight Apple bias may eventually end Microsoft’s 30 years of reign in formats and formatting.¹⁴

Right now, the Empire is busy building its AI Death Star to keep its IT dominance. Markdown plays its role there. Microsoft also has Markdown support in Visual Studio Code and GitHub (which it owns).Other than that, it slowly grows on the surface of a couple of their stranded Star Destroyers. All eyes on AI, they don’t really care that much about Office anymore. AI is so deeply embedded into Windows and Office 365, Microsoft doesn’t really need apps anymore. It could do everything from the Windows search bar. Right now, you still need Office to format what ChatGPT generated, but even that can be done by AI. In a way, you don’t even need a local OS anymore. You could run everything in the cloud and bark sloppy commands at ChatGPT. All these Star Destroyers will eventually strand.

So, ultimately, unless the Office Empire strikes back, the future of digital writing might indeed look more like Markdown than .docx, .ppt¹⁵, .epub, or .pdf.

In the mean time, Markdown is being used more and more—without people being fully aware what it really is and what it’s called. Just like the WYSIWYG became ubiquitous without most people knowing what it’s called. We should nevertheless encourage everyone, especially children, to learn it consciously, to extend their know-how beyond headings, bold and italics. Markdown helps us focus on what we want to say instead of how it looks. It gives us more control over our writing—and over the digital tools we use.

Last December we released the iA Writer for Windows 2.0 beta as part of the iA Winterfest giveaway. After further tweaks and testing we’re pleased to announce that the update has been released.

As the name implies, 2.0 isn’t merely a refresh—it’s an all-singing all-dancing overhaul of the codebase, a total UI refresh, along with many improvements. And It’s a free update for existing users.

In case you missed the beta announcement, here are the highlights:

1. Faster Startup Time and Responsiveness

We split the code base into a small, fast-loading core module that starts immediately, followed by secondary components that load in the background. The result: Writer for Windows 2.0 is now faster and more supple than… an oiled eel. But unlike eels, it’s more fun to work with. For example, check out the startup time comparison:

2. UI for Windows

An immediately visible change is that the 2.0 UI was redesigned to better fit the Windows 11 aesthetic. This amounted to loads of UI changes—too many and too small to count—but the overall effect is beautiful, a room with a view.

3. Tighter Tools

Aside from performance and appearance improvements, 2.0 also includes multiple updates to its tools that help bring it closer to the MacOS version:

Full Width Preview: A much-requested Windows feature. No more UI, no distractions in Preview. At last you get to see your formatted documents in all their glory:

Smarter Snippets: An exclusive to Writer for Windows. Snippets now support multi-line expansions, making it even easier to push out any text you reuse a lot:

Stats: Writer for Windows 2.0 sees an improved stats indicator and shows how far you’ve come at a glance:

Improved notes and commenting: Writer for Windows now mirrors the MacOS version. Use // comment for an internal, private comment, while the “ is exported with your text:

View the full change log.

A big thank you to all beta testers for their feedback. Last but not least, thanks to our users for their patience. Getting out 2.0 took while—but it was well worth the wait.

For over 20 years, NYC Midnight has organized the Inspiring Challenges for Storytellers. As a returning title sponsor, iA will award the top 10 finishers with their own copy of iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, macOS, or Windows.

In addition, the top three finishers will also get a copy of the critically acclaimed iA Notebook—the notebook for writers.

About the Challenge

Already in its 22nd year (wow!) the Screenwriting Challenge (SCC2025) offers international screenwriters a prime opportunity to compete with other writers, get professional feedback on their work, and win great prizes—like iA’s writing tools.¹

How it works

Writers are randomly assigned into groups and in each round are given a genre, subject, and character to work with. Judges select the top writers from each group to move on to the next stage:

1. Round one: Writers receive their first assignment for an original short screenplay of a maximum of 12 pages, to finish in eight days. The top five writers from each group advance.
2. Round two: Writers have three days to write another screenplay, this time with a limit of eight pages. The top three writers in each group advance.
3. Round three: In the third and final round, writers have 24 hours to write a screenplay up to five pages long.

The 2025 challenge starts on February 21 and ends on August 6 with the results of the final round.²

Why participate?

Establishing a regular writing habit is just one of many reasons to participate in a writing contest. NYC Midnight’s challenge is especially good because aspiring screenwriters can:

• Get feedback from the judges for every submission
• Gain access to the NYC Midnight writing community
• Keep the rights to the stories they write and submit
• Have their story published on the NYC Website
• Win great prizes, from thousands of dollars to industry-leading writing tools, like iA Writer

How iA Writer helps

In 2023 we added support for Fountain files. Seasoned screenwriters are likely already familiar with Fountain, a plain text syntax that leverages the strength of Markdown and is tailored for screenwriters.

You can learn more about Writer’s dedicated Fountain template and how you can maximize screenwriting productivity in Writer here. Since its launch, we’ve continued to improve the Fountain template based on user feedback.

iA Writer is beloved by both amateur and professional writers because it is made for distraction-free writing and nothing else. Some features that enhance your writing experience include:

Focus Mode

iA Writer’s signature feature allows you to focus on one sentence or paragraph at a time. How does it work?

Style Check

Easily spot fillers, redundancies, or clichés that might be creeping into your text. Cut it down to the essentials. You can also create custom patterns to highlight expressions that you want to avoid.

Syntax Highlight

Pinpoint awkward verbs, repetitive nouns, or excessive use of certain parts of speech. How does it help?

Live Preview

Watch your screenplay render in real-time as you work. Or you can choose to work fully focused in the Editor while Preview remains on call.

By using Markdown as you write, you can keep your hands on the keyboard and quickly format your work without fiddling with menus. You can further speed up your formatting using shortcuts. Word count will come in handy too.

No AI!

NYC Midnight’s official rules ban using Artificial Intelligence to enhance your writing. Luckily, iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, and Mac comes with its Authorship tool—a simple but amazingly effective way to track what content comes from external sources like AI—and what belongs to you.³

Registration for the 2025 Screenwriting Challenge is open until February 20, 2025. For full details, please see the NYC Midnight website.

Download your free iA Writer trial for SCC2025

Mac

Windows

iA Presenter puts joy back into telling a story. Here’s how.

Most presentation apps expect us to pour our souls into designing slides. It’s a fiddlefest. Instead of letting you think about what to say and how to say it, it nags. Position this. Resize that. Shrink this. Poke that.

In practice, picking fonts, colors and shapes is less fun than it seems. If you’re not a designer, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. We all have more fun when we focus on what we are good at.

A New Guide About Letting Go

The new How To Guide for iA Presenter is 23 minutes long, which seems short for a set of seven tutorials. It is short, because it was made to teach you one thing: A good presentation isn’t about the slides, but about the story you tell. Let go of the rest.

The How To Guide helps you let go of worrying about layouts. You will let go of wondering if your slides will look good online, or on a certain display. Most of all, you will let go of being afraid:

“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” —Yoda, Revenge of the Sith

What Yoda means is that iA Presenter isn’t about sweating over slides. It focuses on what really matters: Your voice, your expert knowledge, your story. When you learn to let go of the rest, you’ll be in full control and your audience will actually listen to you.

iA on YouTube

There’s a lot more to say on the topic of creating great presentations, so be sure to check out our other resources—both in our Support section, and on iA’s official YouTube channel.

And in case you missed it, we created a How To Guide about iA Writer too.

As for the rest, just let it go.

You wrote. We read. And we were moved. Here are the winners of the iA Awards.

This was our first award, and we weren’t sure what to expect or how to judge the submissions. As we read through hundreds of texts and presentations, our criteria became clear. We focused on what matters most when reading: Emotion, Logic, and Impact.¹

These subjective criteria reflect the personal nature of communication, emphasizing the connection between writer and reader.

Choosing the winners wasn’t about finding the objectively best texts or presentations. Instead, we selected the ones that moved us, resonated with us, and left a lasting impression. We discussed. Then we voted.

The Winners

Writing Award: João Sevilhano, On the Beauty of Distraction

João Sevilhano’s essay, On the Beauty of Distraction, explores how we view attention.² “In English, we pay attention. In French, we make it. In German, we gift it.” These terms suggest attention is a limited resource. Sevilhano argues that while technology often gets the blame, distraction is a natural human trait. He believes that embracing both focus and distraction can enrich our lives. 

This essay resonated with our team because it challenged a shared belief, that motivates us as a team, that distractions are purely negative. João made the point that not all distractions are equal. When chosen deliberately as a moment of breathing and not as a fast escape, distraction can give us energy and inspire us to solve our issues. Positive distractions can enhance creativity, memory, and focus.

“When performing our lives trumps the actual living of them, attention becomes a commodity. The market vies for our time and focus, knowing there’s a direct correlation between what we pay attention to and what we, quite literally, pay for. This commodification feeds into a larger societal pressure to constantly do more, achieve more, and be more. We live in an era of relentless ambition, where success is often measured by how much we produce and how little we rest. The hustle culture further fragments our attention, as we’re constantly pushed to divide our focus among numerous goals and tasks.”

This essay moved us and this is why we think that it deserves a wider audience. You can read the full text on this website.

Presentation Award: Fabian Hemmert, Artificial Intelligence: A Car for the Mind?

Fabian captivated us with its engaging delivery and thought-provoking content.³ He skillfully examined the rapid advancements in AI, questioning whether we’ve transitioned from viewing computers as “bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs once suggested, to “cars for the mind.”

Referencing Darth Vader and King Louis as extremes, Hemmert highlighted the potential pitfalls of over-reliance on technology and the loss of human essence. He closes with a strong idea:

“[All of this] raises the question of balancing nature and technology. One might also consider that technology is an inherent part of human nature; we simply cannot do otherwise.”⁴

He suggests the concept of an “inner compass” to guide individuals in discovering new technologies in order to find the balance between embracing artificial augmentation and maintaining a happy human life.

Hemmert’s slides were exemplary—focused and supportive, enhancing his narrative without causing distraction. They effectively guided the attention to his words, allowing the audience to focus on his compelling message.

You can find the video of this presentation also on his website.

Honorable Mentions

Both winners will receive their iA Notebook. Two entries were so close that, while they didn’t win first place, we found that they deserved a notebook as well. After all, the best text isn’t always the most popular, even among our team.

Blake Watson with HTML is for people

Blake Watson’s web book, “HTML is for People,” is a free guide that teaches HTML to beginners.⁵ It uses simple language to help readers build their own websites. A motivating, inspiring project, well written.

“HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on.”

Learn more about HTML for the people.

Chenyu Huang with Sunset

Chenyu Huang’s blog entry, “Sunset,” offers a touching look at visiting his grandparents after ten months apart.⁶ He lovingly describes their aging and the passage of time.

“While grandpa passionately talked about the conflicts in the Middle East and mocked the ‘absurdity’ of American elections, I sat in silence peeling and slicing an apple for him, knowing nothing in my mind was likely to be inducible to a happy conversation.”

Read Chenyu Huang’s text on his blog.

After the award is before the award

It took us two months to review all the submissions. Each was created, at least in part, using our apps. Reading them made us happy.

Thank you for sending in your work. Reading and celebrating it was an honor. This was our first award, and we learned a lot. We plan to continue. So, keep writing, presenting, and sharing your stories—not just for next year’s iA Awards, but to inspire and connect with others.

We’re happy to announce our sponsorship of NYC Midnight’s 2025 Short Story Challenge. Our participation in this prestigious literary event has proven fruitful year after year. We’re looking forward to what 2025 will bring.

Since 2002, NYC Midnight has organized Inspiring Challenges for Storytellers. Writers receive prompts and must complete stories within specific time limits, ranging from 24 hours to eight days, and word count restrictions. NYC Midnight’s challenges start and finish at 11:59 PM New York time.

As a sponsor, iA will award the top 10 finishers a copy of iA Writer for iOS, macOS, or Windows. This year, the top three finishers will also receive their very own iA Notebook.

About the Challenge

Now in its 19th year, the Short Story Challenge (SSC2025) offers writers across the world an opportunity to compete with peers, receive professional feedback, and win great prizes.¹

How it works

Writers are randomly assigned into groups and given a genre, subject, and character to work with. At the end of each round, judges select the top five writers from each group to advance to the next stage. Here’s a quick overview of the contest:

1. In the first round, writers receive a first assignment for a story of a maximum of 2,500 words to finish in eight days.
2. In the second round, advancing writers receive a new assignment for a short story of 2,000 words, written in three days.
3. The third round comes with new assignments and a two-day deadline to write a short story of 1,500 words. Judges then select the finalists.
4. Final assignment: A story no longer than 1,250 words, written in just 24 hours.

The 2025 Challenge kicks off on January 24 and ends on September 10, 2025 with the results of the final round.²

Why enter and write?

Developing and maintaining a regular writing habit is just one of the many reasons to participate in NYC Midnight’s SSC2025. Writers can also:

• Get feedback from the judges for every submission
• Gain access to the NYC Midnight writing community
• Keep the rights to the stories they write and submit
• Have their story published on the NYC Website
• Win great prizes, from thousands of dollars to industry-leading writing tools, like iA Writer

Registration for this year is open until January 23, 2025. For full details please check out the NYC Midnight website.

How iA Writer helps

In a contest with tight deadlines, it’s important to manage time and be focused. Writer is made for writing and nothing else. Here is how it can help you:

Focus Mode

iA Writer’s signature feature allows you to focus on one sentence or paragraph at a time. How does it work?

Style Check

Easily spot fillers, redundancies, or clichés that creep into your text. Cut it down to the essentials. You can also create your own custom patterns to highlight expressions that you want to avoid.

Syntax Highlight

Pinpoint awkward verbs, repetitive nouns, or excessive use of certain parts of speech. How does this help?

Using Markdown allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard and quickly format your work as you go. You can even speed up formatting using shortcuts. Word count will come in handy, too.

No AI!

SSC2025 rules ban use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for submitted content. With iA Writer, you can keep track of what you wrote and what you pasted from external sources. iA’s Authorship tool is available on Writer for Mac, iPhone and iPad. With Writer, you have a reliable ally that tracks the origins of your text, helping make sure that you submit only your own words.³

Ready to jump into the SSC2025? Head on over to the NYC Midnight website and register today. Good luck!

Download your free iA Writer trial for SSC2025

Mac

Windows

2024 was a year of dualities. Analog or digital. Real or fake. Robot or human. Looking back, moving forward.

This year saw the launch of the highly anticipated iA Notebook, while both iA Writer and iA Presenter gained extra shine with new features and updates. Meanwhile, the rest of the world tried to come to terms with the continuing AI stampede. We’ll get to that, but let’s first show you how our year went:

1. iA Notebook

The iA Notebook started shipping in July, after ten years of design and iteration. To our amazement, the first batch sold out within 24 hours. We’re well into the second batch now and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

New to the Notebook? Start with this delightful snippet, transcribed below:

Fffrrrppppp. “Have a listen to that.” Fffrrrppppp. “Oooh.” Fffrrrppppp. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of 81 GSM premium Araveal white pages being flicked in this beautiful Information Architects Notebook.”

Next, take a look at iA’s redesigned Notebook page, where you’ll find more pics, technical specs, and answers to common questions. For a look behind the scenes, check out this post with pics from the Notebook photoshoot that took place in the beautiful coastal town of Kamakura, south of Tokyo.

The Notebook is an homage to iA Writer’s roots, which is why we launched the first iA Awards to celebrate the joy of writing. The winners will be announced in early 2025 and receive their very own Notebooks. If you missed out, don’t worry: We’re planning to run another contest next year, so keep your latest presentation polished and your fountain pen topped up.

2. iA Presenter

Presenter saw more improvements over the course of the year. One highlight is that you can now quickly insert high-quality Unsplash images into your slides without leaving the app. This is a welcome addition, because we all dislike trawling the sea of hyper-polluted stock imagery out there.

More recently, we released Web Sharing: Use it to upload your presentation (with speaker notes) and share the link with anybody. Getting the layouts just right took a year of design and testing, but it was worth the effort.

Try it. After you do, the very idea of emailing slide decks will seem repellent. The notion of sharing a janky PDF will hurl you back through time, into a coal-powered backwater where everybody looks sad and wears soup-stained plaid. Web Sharing for Presenter was the future. Now it’s right here.

3. iA Writer

This year’s Winterfest saw the welcome arrival of iA Writer for Windows 2.0, now in beta. The most visible change is that we redesigned the app to fit the Windows 11 aesthetic—and we love the result. You know you’re living in the future when even Windows starts looking good! Strange days indeed.

Aside from applying the Windows polish, much of the work focused on performance improvements—including a turbo boosted startup time. You can find the full list of changes in the version history.

In November we launched the first How-To Guide for Writer, which shows you everything you need to know in seven steps, or 33 minutes (yes, we counted). The How-To Guide for Presenter will follow in the new year.

Finally, both Writer and Presenter icons got a refresh. Check out our post that describes their evolution in detail.

Watching the bull run

Aside from new arrivals and updates to the growing iA family, we watched as more AI tools jostled for our attention. Like we’ve said before, AI isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. It’s new tech like any other. The trouble is that many AI tools are still being sold with the false promise that we can achieve something for nothing. We’re encouraged to recycle and generate output that we don’t own or even understand.

The year was riddled with AI-related palavers. For example, Figma shared things it really shouldn’t have. Apple’s Writing Tools don’t properly track who wrote what—not yet. Amazon is being flooded with AI-generated books. The web is awash with slop and it will probably stay that way. Perhaps all that junk will sink out of sight and into irrelevance, like marine snow. For those of us skimming the surface, help is at hand: iA’s goal will always help you think more and be more creative (even with AI).

Keep creating

In many ways this was a tough year for human creativity, so we tried to do something about it, be it by sharing Maker’s Knowledge about screenwriting, world building, writing your first novel, or showing you how to deliver a great presentation. Good work comes from hard work, and we want to lend a helping hand in a way that matters. We’ll do more of that in 2025.

But that’s it for now. It has been another busy year for iA, but now it’s time for a break. We’ll be away from December 28 and back on January 6 to give our Support team a much-needed rest.

Until then, thanks for your feedback and continued support. Stay safe. Stay creative. See you in the Year of the Snake.

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