Information Architects Japan
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Sweep the Sleaze
Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and wo...
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Responsive Typography
With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of Web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom Web fonts. But screens have...
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Improving the Digital Reading Experience
There is a difference between checking Google Maps on your iPhone and asking a stranger for directions. It matters whether you listened to Beethoven’s 9th in a concert hall or in your living room, whether it plays from a vinyl LP o...
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iABC
The idea: I look at the history, shape and and sound pattern of each letter, summ it up in 140 characters and Indra collects beautiful specimen for each letter (Don’t miss the full iABC collection). It started with a random tweet i...
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Writer for iPad: FAQ
Here are the frequently asked questions about Writer. First things first—a walkthrough/tutorial for iA Writer for iPad. Best viewed on iPad in portrait mode in a 1:1 ratio… Music: Autogenics I, by The Books Director: Pedro Cascao 1...
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iA Writer: On Prices and Features
It’s been two week since the launch of Writer and it went off like a rocket. We sold almost 5,000 copies in two weeks. Of course, version 1.0 had some birth defects (1.01 is out now), but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive—wi...
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iA Writer for Mac
A better tool doesn’t make a better craftsman, but a good tool makes working a pleasure. iA Writer for Mac is a digital writing tool that makes sure that all your thoughts go into the text instead of the program. Here is what makes iA Wr...
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Business Class: Freemium for News?
I had a perspective changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company (no, I can't tell you who). He asked me what I think about pay walls. I told him what I always say: The main currency of n...
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Writer for iPad: FAQ
Here are the frequently asked questions about Writer. First things first—a walkthrough/tutorial for iA Writer for iPad. Best viewed on iPad in portrait mode in a 1:1 ratio… Music: Autogenics I, by The Books Director: Pedro Cascao 1...
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Form and Information
Here is the lecture I held last week at Keio University on creativity, information and innovation. I’d like to share it with everybody so Keio students can see what other people think about the presentation. It has an introduction ...
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Stephen Fry on Writer
“Stephen Fry, what are your four iPad apps you can’t live without?” Guess what: IMDB, Instapaper, Soundhound and Writer. Fry: “Astonishingly simple. Everything goes away except for the writing experience.” 1. Writer for...
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iPad: Scroll or Card?
How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps “Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers” and they had...
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The Pleasure of the Text
I wasn’t expecting this. In three weeks, we’ve sold over 13,000 apps and every day we seem to climb up another rung in the app store. While selling apps makes the product feel real and secures future development, the biggest ...
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A Web Designer on Fukushima
I'm not a nuclear expert. I am a 40-year-old Swiss Web designer, with a degree in philosophy, living in Tokyo. And I'm a father of a two-year-old boy. I was kind of nonchalant about nuclear energy so far, but not anymore. For obvious rea...
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How We Work Now
All Japan-based employees of iA are doing well. We are however all but untouched by the current events. The many well-wishes of friends and clients help us a lot and we want to thank you for that. Most of our employees have left Tokyo to...
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iPad App Sales Numbers: WIRED vs. Writer
We’re tracking the performance of iA Writer with this wonderful app called AppViz. AppViz not only allows you to track your own sales—you can also use it to evaluate how much other apps make. If you have comparable sales numbers. M...
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Open letter to my friend Zeldman
After an anecdotal back and forth with Zeldman about the .Net awards where he was co-organiser, judge and recipient of three medals, someone asked me later whether I was against prizes in general or just the “circle jerk” pri...
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News on iPad, the Obvious Way
Today our first news project for iPad went online and we are proud like kids. Technically, it’s “just” an HTML5 optimization, but it has been a demanding design process to get to the point of simplicity where it’s...
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Writer for iPad: First Reactions
We launched the iA Writer two days ago. The feedback was nothing short of sensational. We sold over 2,000 apps the first day, which got us a #11 in the iTunes Charts for overall paid apps and #6 for paid apps in the productivity category...
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Can Information be Architected?
My speech “iA on IA,” held at EuroIA, for those who could not attend the conference. Tell me what you think on Twitter. Enjoy! Download as a PDF (5.8MB) In case you haven’t heard already: Our Writer for iPad is availabl...
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Writer for iPad
The key to good writing is not that magical glass of Bordeaux, the right kind of tobacco or that groovy background music. The key is focus. What you need to write well is a spartan setting that allows you to fully concentrate on your tex...
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Can Experience be Designed?
Did someone design what you experience right now? Can experience be designed? Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me a...
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The iPad and the Publishing Industry
The iPad will save the publishing industry as much as the iPod has saved the music industry. Meaning: There are a couple of things in publishing and user interface design that it will change. What things? What's going to happen to the ne...
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iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle
This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It's not complete; we plan to update it as we're working on our own designs.
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The TPUTH, Part I
TPUTH brings four major iA strings together: 1. designing news, 2. monitoring web trends, 3. monetizing content, and 4. being straight forward. In the first post, we’d like to explain some things about the Design and the Technology...
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The TPUTH, Part II
Projects that will probably make some money one day are more probably running out of money very soon. So what is our revenue plan for TPUTH? How are we going to monetize satirical over sized headlines?
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API for News? Reuters, NYT & iA Inc.
Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital Operations, New York Times), Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters) and me were asked to answer the following questions about digital news: 1. When and how shou...
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Meet C140, Our Next Trend Map
It's one year since our last Web Trend Map. A lot has happened, but there are not enough changes in the landscape of domains in the last 12 months. The big changes happened one level higher, on the social layer, that is: On Twitter and f...
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iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned
From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now...
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WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…
First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a coup...
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Cosmic 140—Final Beta
[wp_eStore_fancy:product_id:7:end] Here it is, our next Web Trend Map. No Metro lines, no URLS. This time, it's the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started...
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Q&A with Reuters, New York Times and iA
Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital Operations, New York Times) and Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters) and me were asked to answer the following questions about digital news: When and how s...
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The TPUTH, Part II
Projects that will probably make some money one day are more probably running out of money very soon. So what is our revenue plan for TPUTH? How are we going to monetize satirical over sized headlines? As you might have seen, we have ...
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iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle
This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It's still very raw, but we plan to update it as we're working on our own designs. Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iP...
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My Five Cents on The Thing
The Thing will save the publishing industry as much as the iPod has saved the music industry. Meaning: There are a couple of things in publishing and user interface design that it will change. What things? 1. What's Going to Happen to t...
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Kenya Hara On Japanese Aesthetics
What makes Japanese design so special? According to Kenya Hara it's a matter of simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, completely different from ours. So are things in general better designed in Japan? Well, actually, it's not th...
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Google, Yahoo, Bing: Beyond the Hype
The story is quite clear: Yahoo is going down. Google is going up, Bing is an insignificant fart. via alexa.com Posted via web from iA Sketchbook
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Updating Krone, Austria’s Biggest News Site
Last week we launched another newspaper project. After covering a high percentage of newspaper sites in Switzerland and redoing DIE ZEIT, iA moved to the other very challenging side of the online news spectrum: With krone.at we updated o...
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Arial versus Helvetica
via swiss-miss.com Posted via web from iA Sketchbook
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Concept Internazionale
L’Internazionale is rightfully proud of its very dedicated readership. Out of 100'000 readers, 30'000 come to Ferrara each year to meet the editors. The facebook group of Internazionale boasts 23'000 fans, a huge number if you compare it...
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Zeit Online by iA
iA has redesigned ZEIT ONLINE, the Internet edition of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. Here is how it looks: First, a short introduction of the newspaper for non German speakers about DIE ZEIT (from Wikipedia): DIE ZEIT (German pronun...
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Trends we can Believe in: Webtrendmap.com
We've finally launched the interactive version of our popular poster. Webtrendmap.com turned out to not just be the base for our next year's poster, it is a new way to find high quality content. iA's newest product helps you finding t...
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New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging
We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem. One might speculate if the true reason for boring text are the boring writers... but I prefer to blame it on the word processors. Word...
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Social Media Marketing? Kaboom, Baby!
Last week on twitter, writing the dirty draft for this article, I claimed that social media marketer is just another word for spammer. If that upset you, don't read the following text. First, what are we talking about here? What is mark...
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Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta
Here it is, posted in a panic: Web Trend Map 4. We'll give you a week for final feedback before we send it to the printer. Download: For the final feedback round, we only offer a PNG (2.6MB). There are more formats to come. Feedback:...
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Web Trend Map 4: Coolest Gift For Geeks
The beta version has been featured all across the web from TechCrunch to BoingBoing, and Gawker. Now the latest version of our popular Web Trend Map is up for grabs. The Web Trend Map plots the Internet's leading names and domains on...
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Introducing webtrendmap.com
Where is this year's clickable version of the Web Trend Map? And the screen savers? And the background images? And the PDFs? Answer: Forget about that. We have something way better in the making. Currently iA is building an interacti...
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The Spectrum of User Experience (1)
As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other. That's why we keep them separated: Can't ...
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The Value of Information
When confronted with the necessity of offering news for free, editors are quick at pointing at the cost involved in news production. Which of course is beside the point. Information on the Internet is as common as snow in the arctic. You...
