International Magic creates a new presentation app, Dekks

The experience design studio International Magic has been making viewers’ lives a lot easier with its user-friendly and thoughtful creations for years now. With landmark projects for the likes of FKA twigs, 032c, Somerset House & Manchester International Festival (just to name a few), now, the studio is turning its attention to the creation of tools, and how to make our creative lives easier with other forms of technology.

Based between London, Glasgow, Bath and Munich, the remote studio, founded by Adam Rodgers and Stefan Endress never fails to inject a glimmer of intrigue and excitement into the expansive field that is screen-based design.

“We see technology as an ever-changing, transient phenomenon that simultaneously informs what we do and how we do it,” creative producer Ben McKinnon tells It’s Nice That. “It’s difficult to step back from technology because it has become such an intrinsic part of our every day lives.” As the gap between the digital and physical gets smaller, for International Magic, the opportunity to create more efficient, streamlined processes just gets bigger. One particular process the studio was keen to refine was the exercise of presentation-building and creating “decks”; an often arduous recurrence for those in the creative industry.

The studio asked itself: “How can we connect the dots between what is happening now and what the future might look like?” Then developing strategies from these findings, International Magic created an all-in-one presentation app, Dekks, with the intention of feeling more humanistic, rather than robotic. “We all present new ideas, pitch concepts, share portfolios or create mood boards in some way or another more than ever before,” continues Ben. “Our workflows and output frequency have changed completely with the advent of new technology, however, we’ve been stuck with the same presentation tools from the past.”

After three years of running its own custom prototype of Dekks in-house, the studio which specialises in creating new modes of interaction has decided to release the product to the world. Designed to remove all the faff that goes into making presentations, the app alone lets us “collaborate with others, embed high-quality images and videos, use custom fonts and share the presentation via a link,” resulting in a unified tool for a more fluid creative process from beginning to end.

Back in the beginning, when the studio first identified the problem, it took just one night to build the first prototype which “solved a bunch of problems” from the get-go. With great feedback following shortly, International Magic went onto win new work with this digital-first approach. Soon enough, the team of designers and developers realised the potential of the product as other members of the creative community shared similar problems, going on to develop the prototype into a fully functioning app to be released very soon.

No more drowning in avalanches of proposals, portfolios, project updates and so on, with Dekks, the studio found a more manageable way to have all its content in one place. As a remote studio working from a number of different locations, the new tool “forces us to use the right tools to streamline the workflow as a team,” continues Ben. “We tried many presentation apps, and sometimes they addressed our needs, however, none of them felt intuitive or enabled us to present with confidence.”