Ludus Interview #3: Henry Daubrez from Dogstudio

This time, we received the insights from Henry Daubrez, Partner and Design Director at Dogstudio, a design and technology firm located in Chicago (USA) and Namur (Belgium).

Why were you interested in using Ludus at first? And why not another tool?

Well, it’s a pretty easy one.

Over the five last years, Dogstudio’s growth led us to dramatically multiply the number of online presentations we produced. Whether it is to pitch a new project, defend design proposals, give design conferences or simply introduce Dogstudio to new prospects, we need to be able to quickly create beautiful presentation decks.

While most existing tools could pretty easily fill most of our required tasks, there were a few big recurring issues and especially for us designers: in all other online presentation solutions, typography management sucks! You can barely modify line-height and don’t get me started on importing your own fonts or playing with kerning.

It’s like there’s this gigantic black hole when it comes to make online presentations look as good and detail-oriented as what we’re trying to achieve everyday as a design agency.

Now, as for the second big reason for us: self-hosted videos. It’s lovely that we are now able to say goodbye to YouTube uploads for good.

How precisely is it helpful for an agency to use such a tool? What features made the difference for you?

We had this very large Keynote file (full of images and videos) we sometimes used as a support to introduce ourselves to new prospects and clients, and Ludus allowed us to stop having to use WeTransfer to send hundreds of megabytes to our clients, when we can just send them a simple URL free of version-related issues and directly accessible on smartphones and tablets.

Why are Smart Blocks such a game changer in the way you collaborate around presentations?

At Dogstudio, we’re heavily relying on both Photoshop and Sketch and working with Ludus feels as easy and as natural as working with our regular design tools.

Now, considering that we are a team of around 40 people and more than 15 of us often have to create presentations, Smart Blocks enabled us to create a brand-guideline-compliant library of our regularly used slides and elements for everyone to use, without having to either struggle, or redesign everything from scratch over and over again.

Who is using it most at your agency? Designers, marketers, project managers, or all of them?

As for today, Ludus is mostly used by designers and account managers, but I can easily see it being used by other people as soon as Ludus will have developed a few more core functionalities in terms of slide manipulation. The less friction there is, the more people will use it.

Is it fair to say you switched to Ludus? For what reasons?

We’re on our way! We didn’t fully switch to Ludus yet, but we use it for what it’s doing best so far, and will surely be rolling out to more use cases following its promising development.

Why do you think Ludus can be a game changer? Or what makes it truly unique?

Because they’re truly trying to give back more control to the user when it comes to online presentations. We’re slowly coming to the end of an era of self-indulgence when it comes to create ugly PowerPoint or Keynote presentations. There will be no more excuses in the future.

We’d like to thank Henry and his team at Dogstudio for their time and all the feedback provided on a regular basis! If you also use Ludus with your agency (or individually) and would like to be featured in this publication, just drop us an email at info@ludus.one!