The name

한지 (hanji) is traditional Korean handmade paper. It is made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, laid and pressed by hand, and it is known above all for one thing: it lasts.

Documents written on hanji have survived a thousand years. The oldest surviving woodblock print in the world sits on Korean paper from the eighth century, and it is still legible today. The paper was made to be written on, and made to keep what was written on it, which is a rarer pairing than it sounds, because most surfaces you can write on freely will not hold the writing for long, and most surfaces that endure a millennium were never meant to take ink in the first place. Hanji does both.

That is also the whole thesis of the product in a single word.

A knowledge base should be a surface that holds your writing for as long as you need it, in a form you can always read, on a foundation you control. Software comes and goes. Formats fall out of fashion, companies get acquired, apps stop shipping updates and quietly rot. The writing should not go down with them. The paper should outlast the app.

We kept the metaphor close in the craft too. The reading surface is warm, like a fresh sheet. The color is drawn from Korean tradition. The mark is a Korean letter, cut back to its bones. None of that is decoration. It is the same claim the paper makes, carried into the pixels: made by hand, meant to endure. See The visual language.