Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster

Summary

Some highlights and lowlights. I think of presentation slides as having 3 main jobs: Emphasize key points, so people remember Break up complex concepts, so people learn Entertain, so people pay attention This calls for slides that are mostly images or very short phrases. A minority of slides justify designing something to match the vibe or illustrate a point – a diagram, for example. This can mean going back and forth between Keynote and, say, Figma, but it’s worth the effort. This year I’ve been spending a lot of time in Figma, so when I was recently asked to speak at an event I thought, “Why not try Figma Slides?” Figma Slides launched a year back, and graduated from beta in March. I’ve used Keynote for almost 20 years now – it seemed like time for me to finally upgrade my presentation tool. So I gave it a whirl. Pretty quickly, I liked building slides right in Figma. The Grid view made it easy for me to structure my ideas. Features like Auto Layout and Components made building slides that adapt to different text and images a snap. For example, a key point in my talk was that selecting a JavaScript framework can be overwhelming. It was easy to build a quick visual of this right in the deck. Components and Auto Layout made this 10x faster to build in Figma than Keynote. Admittedly, Figma Slides is missing some Keynote features that I think of as pretty essential. For example, Keynote has long had a toggle to “Autosize Text”, which will set an object’s font size to just big enough to fill its container. There’s no way to do this in Figma’s auto layout because Figma only wants to support layouts that CSS Grid can implement. That constraint makes sense when designing for the web, but shows how hard it is to expand a design tool to other domains. Another odd omission is that you can’t easily create a slide where items (e.g. bullets, sections of a diagram) appear with each click. The closest you can do is to split them into different layers, add a “Fade” animation of 1 ...