The paper presents the design of the distributed multimedia kernel system (DMKS) developed for supporting multimedia applications based on a distributed approach. It adopts the device independent GKS concepts and extends them to include images and text from databases using a reference method, so that it is not necessary for the application program to have direct contact with the actual contents. The task of manipulating the real image and text data can be left until the presentation stage which is performed on the workstation. The various advantages offered with such an approach to multimedia integration are described, and details of the implementation of DMKS are given to illustrate the practical aspects of the system.