I had no big plans when I subrented my little backroom in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo in October 2005. My plan was to create a design office that would allow me to survive in Tokyo. Six years later, I can proudly announce that we just opened our 3rd office. iA now has offices in Tokyo, Berlin and Zurich.

iA: Plan, Design, Code

So far, with a few exceptions, we have offered only design and strategy services. We simply didn’t have a tech team strong enough to support the projects that we were asked to plan and design. As of August 2011, we do have a team of coders that operate on the same level as our design team in Tokyo and our strategy team in Zurich. Why the change?

We were already halfway there. We develop the most important elements of our designs in code with the help of HTML prototypes. At a certain point, it felt silly to do half of the coding without getting real. But we decided to wait until we had the right team to do the heavy lifting on the backend.

We have found a great team of developers that we know for many years, suddenly offering to jump on board.

You can discuss whether or not Web design is 95% typography, but in most cases Web budgets are 95% technology. And you can’t do much about it, since technology budgets are not necessarily made by people that understand the value of design. If you can offer both design and code, it’s easier to argue – as it doesn’t look like you just want to snatch a part of the tech budget.

iA Berlin: Profile

Who

iA Berlin is lead by Benjamin Birkenhake, the former IT project manager of ZEIT ONLINE (a client of ours). Benjamin managed the relaunch of ZEIT ONLINE in 2009 together with our teams in Zurich and Tokyo. He also worked in content management for Bertelsmann and Axel Springer Management, the two major German publishing houses. Ben’s initial team consists of Marcus Abel and Sascha Hagemann, friends since university and active Web developers in content management for more than half a decade. As development is always in need of more people, we plan on growing the team in Germany. Drop us a line if you’re interested in working for us.

What

iA Berlin concentrates on Web Content Management, with a special focus on Open Source Architectures and mostly PHP systems. We love WordPress and we love Drupal almost the same, but we aim to solve every task with the right tool. So we also do programming from scratch, as well as setups with architectures based on several open source components. And last but not least, iA Berlin of course produces finest HTML, CSS and Javascripting.

Why

iA Berlin is great addition to our two existing offices. Throughout most of our projects, we have learned, that a great tech-team is the final key to a successful project and an impressive product. The place we work at, the web, is a constantly driven by technological advances. To keep track of this, but also to be able to play with new stuff and get a feeling for it’s potentials we’re glad to have some of the most talented coders in Europe with us.