Magic Hour Marketing Studio: Designing a Unified Experience for a Growing Creative Toolset

Context

Magic Hour is an AI creative platform with a growing library of image and video generation tools.

Magic Hour’s library of more than 100 free AI video and image tools

Problem

Magic Hour had 100+ tools but no guidance on which one to use.

The create page pushes popular tools and trending templates to drive generation, but this hasn’t worked: only 2.40% of generations used the template entry-point over a 30-day testing window.

The old Magic Hour create page, a wall of trending templates and effects — The old create page UI

As the Product Design Intern, I was brought on to design Marketing Studio, a new feature for creating marketing-related content that brings individual tools into a single guided workflow, aimed at surfacing clearer, more useful use cases.

How might we guide users to go from an idea to the right tool, without expecting them to already know the library?

Solution

01. Generate directly from a template, or start from scratch

A chatbox UI cycles through templates, letting users work from an auto-filled prompt or write their own.

02. Browse Templates by Category

Categorized templates across use cases, letting users quickly remix directly from any template.

03. Post-Generation Editing

A live editor canvas lets users make specific edits or add-ons after generating, refining without starting from scratch.

04. Accessible Entrypoint

A card on the home page surfaces Marketing Studio through a simplified version of its carousel-chatbox UI, inviting quick experimentation.

Research and Direction

Competitor Analysis

I looked at how competitors approached a similar idea, noting what worked and what could translate to Magic Hour.

Marketing Studio’s Positioning

To see what features could be brought into Magic Hour, I separated out key elements and built a decision matrix using the categories derived from competitor analysis.

Decision matrix plotting features by effort against quality, with the optimal area marked

The goal for marketing studio is to create a low effort and high quality experience, meaning quality results quickly. This also meant trading off customization and control.

This direction was designed to reflect Magic Hour’s actual strengths in the market: low-friction entry and free-rolling credits, which attract beginners. Marketing Studio needed to stay beginner-friendly, even if that meant less customization.

Design Decisions

User Flow

Home Screen Explorations

Quick Template Remix Iterations

The Branding Problem

Magic Hour looked like every other AI startup.

While designing the tool, a deeper gap needed to be addressed: Magic Hour had no distinct visual identity, and uses the same purple-and-dark palette used across many other AI Startups, costing distinction in the market. Early on, I pushed for a stronger branding, but a full rebrand wasn’t something the founder thought was worth committing to, especially without an in-house designer to carry it forward.

Marketing Studio became a testing ground for a stronger visual identity.

I proposed a smaller test: a polished visual system built into Marketing Studio, using colors close to its current design system blend into the existing frameworks.

Scaling for the future

I also built an internal tool that applies a consistent shader and gradient treatment to any image or video in Magic Hour’s brand colors, so the idea could scale past one feature.

Seeing the visual direction physically shipped over simply pitching it helped to open up more serious reconsideration of Magic Hour’s broader branding.