One person. Twenty-six years. A change of direction.

Profile

Intrinsic Ninja is me — Jonathan Mao, founder and owner. It started in 2000 as Intrinsic Digital, a design studio in Canberra. It became Intrinsic Ninja later because things change, and everybody loves a ninja.

The word

Intrinsic — belonging naturally; essential. The things I do here aren’t services I picked from a list. They’re the things I’ve always done: design, photography, film, music, and — for the last few years — building software.

From design to apps

For two decades this was a design studio: brands, websites, photography, video, tour posters for Canberra bands, mixing and mastering under the Intrinsic Ninja Records name. That work’s still here, and I still do it.

But somewhere along the way the websites I was designing became web apps, the web apps needed native iPhone versions, and I found I liked building the product as much as designing it. So I learned Swift properly, built six apps of my own — Budgeteer, Electra, Taxare, GetFit, Iaso and a Travel Planner prototype — and shipped them.

That’s now the centre of what I do: native iPhone apps and accessible websites, designed and built by the same person.

How I work

Small, direct, honest. You talk to the person doing the work. Discovery first, a fixed quote, short build cycles, no surprises.

Tools

Swift and SwiftUI. WordPress. PHP and MySQL when an app needs a backend. Figma. A camera, an edit suite and a mixing desk that all still earn their keep.

Canberra

I’m here, and I’m happy to meet for coffee. I work with clients across Australia too — everything works over video except the coffee.