About
One person. Twenty-six years. A change of direction.
Canberra · est. 2000 · founder-run
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.
Our content specialist, AJ, has over 25 years of experience in the private and public sector. She will work with you to optimise the content so that it’s easy to read and understand.
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 built six apps of my own — Budgeteer, Electra, Taxare, GetFit, Iaso and TripPlot — 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.
What I believe · 01
It should be easy
In every sense. If a person has to think about how to use it, I haven’t finished.
Design and code are one job
Splitting them across two people is where most products get worse.
Accessible is the baseline
Not a feature. Everything I ship meets WCAG 2.2 AA.
Ship your own things
You learn more from one app in the App Store than from ten built for other people.
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.