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Figma Slides
- stnmtn 2y agoSeems like a slam dunk idea for Figma
- marcinignac 2y agoNow the question is will there be offline mode that works with embedded videos so one can do a proper conference talk.
- jimmyl02 2y agoI don't know if the tone selector UX was used by other companies before but it is so simple and intuitive I'm surprised I haven't seen it more. I wouldn't be shocked if it becomes a standard within all the AI tools Great stuff from Figma, many people I know have already been using it for slides and this is a great next step
- impure 2y agoiA Writer also added presentations recently. Seems like presentation software is getting popular again.
- sho 2y agoI like IA and I'm checking out their new presenter, thanks for the tip. But geeze I wish they'd have a better example in their showreel video. Who, exactly, makes, presents and is presented with these "What is design?" fluff shows with giant "inspirational" pictures accompanied a single line of text? Even Apple has to occasionally show, you know, a slide that isn't just a giant well-chosen picture.
- tyleo 2y agoHell, I’m a dev and I already produce most of my slide shows in Figma. I’m so happy a dedicated product is coming! I find Figma unmatched for architecture diagrams. It’s nice to have them at my disposal when preparing slide shows.
- flakiness 2y agoJust curious, why do you use Figma over other slide making tools? Just for architecture diagrams, or your familiarity with the tool? I'm not a Figma user and have no clue, and am wondering if it's worth giving a shot as a new user.
- ThomPete 2y agovisual control
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoUltimately it just feels better, over Keynote I’d say better alignment controls, less defaults to unset, collaboration and sharing which keynote lacks, zoom out to see the whole thing and move things about easier. Also because it’s already an excellent design tool you never hit the wall where a diagram can’t be created in it like you hit often in Keynote/PPT/Google Slides (I haven’t tried Figma Slides yet, this is normal Figma)
- pm90 2y agoFor architecture diagrams Ive found Google drawing will work for my use cases. And if its something fancy, lucidchart.
- IshKebab 2y agoI would definitely use Draw.io over Google Drawings. That sounds a bit masochistic to be honest!
- danielxli 2y agoGreat way to add new use cases for existing users! Not sure if this will bring people over from ppt but certainly many folks who would rather continue using figma don't have to leave
- mikece 2y agoIn what way would Figma be better for creating slide decks than Canva?
- benatkin 2y agoFigma components could be used in it. Penpot has components and is open source and I would like to see slide shows in it. https://penpot.app/penpot-2.0 https://penpot.app/penpot-2.0
- flakeoil 2y agoTheir landing page does not really show much about this product. It looks just like boring powerpoint.
- knallfrosch 2y agoBut it has Presenter Mode (a feature that PowerPoint has shipped with for the last 20 years..) > See your presenter notes and preview the next slide—all within Presenter View
- yoshuaw 2y agoI’ve been making my slides in Figma for a couple of years now, and having this supported as a first-class flow will be very welcome!
- rylan-talerico 2y agoFigma is already my favorite way to design presentations, but the lack of presentation tools like presenter notes has prevented me from switching from traditional tools. Happy that the Figma product team identified this as an opportunity worth investing in. Figma's overall product trajectory is exceeding my expectations.
- politelemon 2y agoIt would be good to see some demos of what this can produce, this just looks like PPTX-light on the web, and the slide templates don't really show much.
- hardwaregeek 2y agoI would disagree. Figma Slides got maybe the most positive response at the keynote. Most designers I know already use Figma for slides, so to make a first party experience with speaker notes and good UX would be understandably very popular.
- dang 2y ago"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- politelemon 2y agoUnderstood, thanks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoAnnouncement post: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-slides/ https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-slides/
- mmckelvy 2y agoThis is great. I find I'm using Figma in place of other tools more and more. I could see using Figma instead of Word / Google docs pretty soon as well.
- math_dandy 2y agoI know very little about Figma, but if their presentation product can (one day) understand LaTeX math syntax and render it, then I’ll definitely learn it!!
- lolbert2 2y ago[dead]
- patchorang 2y agoDesigners are pretty good at siloing themselves. I worry this may further silo them as the rest of the business will continue to use PPT. Designers frequently express frustration about "not having a seat at the table." It's going to be tough to influence the business when using a different tool than everyone else. Edit: PPT or Google Slides* My point was more about using the tool that the rest of the business is using.
- echelon 2y agoAs an engineer for well over a decade, I've never once touched PowerPoint or any Microsoft productivity suite, so I don't think it's as black and white as you say. Google slides have been the bread and butter of all the engineering presentations I've seen and been a part of. And that's too many to even try to count. I think this depends on what the C-suite was sold more than anything. I've never worked in a "Microsoft shop". Let designers use their own thing. There's no harm.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoInteresting. I don't know a single person that uses google slides in a professional context. It's ppt files or even just pdfs. Designers will whip something up in InDesign or Illustrator if they want total control in rare instances, though.
- koito17 2y agoTo add another data point, I can't remember the last time I've seen a PowerPoint. Maybe in high school? In every job I've had, people used Google Slides, if presenting a slideshow at all. Additionally, when designers have demonstrated things (e.g. mock designs), they have always shared a Figma window.
- dijit 2y agoEurope (especially germany, or gamedev) is all PPTs. I sold google workspace to my org and Google Slides is what is giving me the most backlash because it is considered woefully inadequate compared to powerpoint. Especially around brand identity tied to fonts.
- brazzledazzle 2y agoSeems like Figma and Miro are converging a bit but from different directions
- jagged-chisel 2y agoDoes this export to PowerPoint?
- ffhhj 2y agoFigma, allow us to do local changes even when files are read-only, so we can fix last minute stuff before exporting to svg.
- chatmasta 2y agoFunny, I was just wondering today why Google doesn’t have an infinite canvas product. All I want is Google Slides with an infinite canvas. Products like Figma, Miro, and Excalidraw are all great, but they’re not integrated into Google Workspace like Docs/Slides. I like comments, tagging users, auto-completing links to other docs with their title, etc.
- dijit 2y agoGoogle slides has other pretty major problems for presenting things. Notably if your corporate identity requires the use of a specific font, then its not possible. Figma is a lot better in this regard, but the pricing is aggressive for the design part.
- dbg31415 2y agoEven when you pay for enterprise, Google support will say things like, “Just change your brand font to use a Google Font!” It’s pretty awful and arrogant.
- dijit 2y agoI understand a large amount of the technical and legal reasons for this, but I agree. It hurts my position greatly as an advocate of their services internally and leads to us having to use Powerpoint anyway.
- dbbk 2y agoObject sizing and alignment is also garbage, barely functional, and has not been fixed in decades.
- ec109685 2y agoI worked somewhere where they went through this and got a custom font added: https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/170jgfl/upload_custom_font_otfwoff_to_gsuite/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/170jgfl/upload_cust... Pretty disappointing and convoluted though.
- 2y ago
- pwthornton 2y agoAll of our serious decks are produced in Figma. Slides and PowerPoint can't make a good enough looking presentation. Internal stuff, quick stuff to show clients, whatever, use Slides, but for trying to win new accounts, we use Figma.
- mdorazio 2y agoCounterpoint: I have never encountered a “designer deck” that I couldn’t recreate in PowerPoint. Most people just really suck at PowerPoint / Slides and, to be fair, the functionality to make things look good is often unintuitive. Just as a random example, most people don’t know that shapes in PowerPoint are full vector objects with editable Bézier curves and Boolean tools available.
- aikinai 2y agoPowerPoint I believe you (or at least don’t know enough myself to argue). But for Slides, there’s no way. How, for example, would you put an outline around text?
- ux-app 2y agoYep, it's the outline around text that won you the client.
- aikinai 2y agoOr embedded videos, or non-trivial animations, or non-Google fonts, or transparent strokes, or vector shapes (excluding the workaround I shared above). Sure, you can win clients without any of that stuff. Why do you need anything more than basic text and maybe some pictures? But there are reasons people and companies strive for more polish and professionalism. There's a reason even Google uses Keynote for the I/O keynote, even though you can technically show the same information in Slides.
- earthnail 2y agoPowerpoint's font rendering is horrible. If you care about typography it's a show-stopper. I can tell sth was made in Powerpoint just by looking at the font. Apple Keynote, otoh, has always been excellent at rendering fonts. The same slide, with a single Arial 80 headline, always looks better in Keynote than Powerpoint. Figma's font rendering is also excellent, which gets me very excited, because Keynote just isn't collaborative.
- wtf77 2y agoHow much they will charge for something we can already do?
- yoz 2y agoAt my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited: - I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell. - Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn't have to manually add line breaks to deal with this. - Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn't anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don't even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides's limitations. - Layer/object lists. (Note: I don't see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it's available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don't want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile. (If you're wondering why I'm focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can't collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven't used PowerPoint much, it's okay.) UPDATE: I've now done a little playing with Figma Slides. The good news is that it has an object list. But it's only in Design Mode. (So it won't be available to free or non-designer accounts - that's a Figma thing.) The bad news is that in this beta the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there's no way to change the timing or easing. However, "smart animate" is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like "move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2". (Note the emphasis on this beta. Figma Slides won't be considered GA until next year, so I'm hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)
- Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago> I use animation a lot, My personal preference is the opposite: I came to hate presentations that use animations. Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
- lern_too_spel 2y agoAnimations are essential for presenting mathematical concepts visually to help more of the audience follow along. Also, rendering LaTeX. Google Slides makes you use other tools and only clunkily lets you insert them into your presentation.
- howon92 2y agoWow this is really cool
- kshri24 2y agoIts crazy that Figma has time to bring out a completely new product but has no time to just implement a Dark Mode for FigJam [1]. Its been 3 years and counting. [1]: https://forum.figma.com/t/dark-mode-for-figjam/3147 https://forum.figma.com/t/dark-mode-for-figjam/3147
- maximilianroos 2y agoHappy to see them making the correct prioritization
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kshri24 2y agoWell in that case many won't be using FigJam which is a real shame because it is an awesome product. The only thing stopping me from using it is that it causes eyesight issues. It is not even some fancy feature. Basic accessibility in 2024 shouldn't be a big ask. Especially considering they implemented dark mode for Figma in 2022 [1]. Extending to FigJam is just a few more lines of code. Shouldn't take 3 years to do this. [1]: https://forum.figma.com/t/launched-figma-dark-mode-theme/229/37 https://forum.figma.com/t/launched-figma-dark-mode-theme/229...
- cycomanic 2y agoWhat does this add over slides.com, pretzi.com or any of the many other presentation tools (for devs there also the many text to slides tools like reveal.js, slides.dev, impress.js)? I thought this space is pretty saturated is this essentially just to capture and lock in more users into a single tool?
- steren 2y agoFigma invested years in this super powerful real time canvas, only using it for UX mocks is not tapping its full potential
- crakhamster01 2y agoWhat use case(s) would leverage the potential more?
- bags43 2y agoThis does not work in Firefox really well.
- barrrrald 2y agoPackaging on this is interesting – from pricing page: How much will Figma Slides cost when it is generally available? Figma Slides will be included in all Starter plans for free or can be purchased for $3 per seat/month on Professional plans, and $5 per seat/month on Organization and Enterprise plans. Do I need to have a full Figma design seat to use Figma Slides? No, you do not need to have a paid Figma Design or paid FigJam seat to use Figma Slides. You will need a paid Figma Design seat to use advanced design tools in Figma Slides.
- Aerbil313 2y agoMeanwhile, I use typesetting (Typst) to create slides. I know I should just dump it and use Google Slides but I just can't help myself, as a hacker in spirit. Take a look at one of my school project presentations, Hypnotherapist-GPT: https://typst.app/project/r-gKDYaSo4KvbEJo-LNYTV https://typst.app/project/r-gKDYaSo4KvbEJo-LNYTV
- sirjaz 2y agoThis is just another webapp, please God please can we go back to making true desktop/native apps again. We have these powerful machines that are under utilized for what they are.
- wraptile 2y agoWhile I'd agree with you 99% of the time Figma's web stack is probably one of the very few that can actually compete against native/desktop apps.
- sirjaz 2y agoFigma has done an amazing job, I just don't want to depend on a constant connection for my software, and someone else's computer
- tianzhou 2y agoCombining the best of Google Slides and Apple Keynote
- johnoh_lilysai 2y agoFor anyone has hard time watching full figma config conference keynote - I made detailed summary note for that video. Hope this can help you guys. https://lilys.ai/digest/842857 https://lilys.ai/digest/842857
- wraptile 2y agoPlayed around for 30 minutes and it's kinda underwhelming. It works and is pleasant to use but it's very simple and doesn't really do anything any slides software from 10 years ago couldn't do.
- gherkinnn 2y agoI have fallen in love with the opposite approach: IA Presenter [0] (no affiliation). It's just markdown and content. The rest is taken from you. 0 - https://ia.net/presenter https://ia.net/presenter
- sundry_gecko 2y agoThis is indeed awesome. Our design team made a few templates to stay on brand. It’s a bliss.
- wafriedemann 2y agoI read the announcement ages ago. This is it now? Something everyone can replicate with html in less than 5 minutes? Edit: and of course it's subscription-based.
- earthnail 2y agoGive it a try. It's all about workflow. And they have a one-time purchase option as well; no need to subscribe if you don't like subs (which I understand).
- gherkinnn 2y agoWhat an uncharitable and reductionist take. You can buy it "like software in a box" and it is certainly more than HTML and five minutes of work. The same way IA Writer is more than just a text box.
- bschwindHN 2y agoWow, it supports WebP images. Google Slides doesn't support WebP, despite google being the company that _invented_ WebP.
- albert_e 2y agoFigma has a reputation with its dark patterns for pricing - people might be wary before adopting their products.
- FireInsight 2y agoTried it, wrote a long comment here, but seems I accidentally discarded that. Here's the gist of it; The product does not from other presentation tools except in that it is integrated with Figma. Only the best parts of Figma, the design things, are very much restricted unless you pay for a subscription that includes design mode. There are still some bugs, and animation support it underwhelming and slide transitions don't work as well as in other applications. As a casual user, I would have loved something more integrated with the design workspace in Figma. With how the product is now, I might as well continue using Libreoffice Impress and get way more features at the cost of having to use an ugly piece of software.
- philjackson 2y agoI'm the CTO of Pitch, so obvious bias here, but have you tried our product? Would love to know what you miss from Impress when using Pitch.
- FireInsight 2y agoI don't know if I'm interested on giving you a free UX consultation Your product to me seems to be just another freemium presentation product meant for sales pitches, a target market I'm not a part of. For that reason, your product doesn't really strike me as any more interesting than Figma's offering, even if it is technically superior. Figma's has a considerable edge too, as I already trust their web-based design products.
- philjackson 2y agoNo worries! Didn't mean to ask for free work, thought since you were trying out Figma Slides you might on the hunt for a new tool.
- pottertheotter 2y agoI don't know if you've changed it, but when I tried used Pitch last year I couldn't zoom in on a slide, which was such a basic use case I needed while putting slides together that I stopped right there.
- Jiahang 2y agoMake ppt more fun
- turnsout 2y agoWow… This is going to murder Google Slides in the design industry. We only used Slides because it was remote friendly—designing slide layouts in it was absolute torture.
- alexb_ 2y agoA ton of people in the comments are talking about Google Slides. Does nobody use PowerPoint anymore? What advantages does Google Slides have over good old fashioned PPT?
- lexicality 2y agoIt's free
- gardenhedge 2y agoDoes anyone have a good, straightforward guide on how to get the most out of Figma? Whenever I am sent a link, the experience is always a bit jarring.
- npilk 2y agoWhat I think a lot of the comments are missing here is that many companies who use Figma are already using Figma to create and present slide decks. (The company I work for is a perfect example.) It's maybe not the intended use of their software, but it's a very popular one. So the competitive angle here isn't stealing market share from Google Slides/PPT, or trying to get new users to pick this over other web presentation tools. It's adding this as a first-class use case for people already building slides in Figma to further ingrain the 'ecosystem'.
- CaveTech 2y agoThis doesn't really make sense, there would not be ROI to cater to a market of users who are choosing to already use the product for that use case when it's not supported. They _are_ ingrained in the ecosystem. It is pretty clearly targeted at making this more mainstream and mass-market.
- filleduchaos 2y agoI'm no product manager, but how on earth does it not make sense to elevate a use case that people clearly want from ad-hoc solution to actual feature?
- mitemte 2y agoI’ve haven’t worked at a company where Figma is used “correctly”. It’s mostly used as a canvas to dump designs, slideshows, flowcharts and diagrams. For example, N/Shift+N moves forward/backward a frame. I’m yet to see a Figma file where frames are correctly ordered or laid out, rendering this feature almost useless.
- npilk 2y agoFYI - there are plugins that can help you easily order your frames by position or in other ways that make sense (I think the one I use is called Sorter). But that's another example of the sort of hacky 'workaround' that should have first-class support if enough people need it.
- artur_makly 2y agoFunny..but I was expecting them to have it all be done with just one Ai Prompt. "Computer.. generate a 10-slide presentation with my branding style in `file-X`, The goal of the presentation is to pitch investors about our startup. Focus on these slides : [Sure! Here are the main section titles for the 10-page slide deck: 1. Title Slide 2. Problem Statement 3. Solution 4. Market Opportunity 5. Business Model 6. Go-to-Market Strategy 7. Traction and Milestones 8. Team 9. Financial Projections 10. Closing and Call to Action] dont forget the hockey stick figures.
- zanellato19 2y agoI'm really happy with this, so we can move our company presentations to Figma and move out of Google Slides, specially for Product.
- the-mitr 2y agoI use Inkscape with Sozi to create some nice slides.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]