9 ms·
Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster
- lauritz 1y agoI think there is opportunity for a more design-oriented tool in this space. I tried pitch.com a while back and was a heavy Google Slides user for a while, but, like the author, I keep coming back to Keynote. What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.
- slashdave 1y agoI've been drag-dropping pdf figures into slides since Keynote first came out. For charts it was such a relief from the crappy pixelated stuff that you still need to use for Powerpoint.
- daemin 1y agoThe lesson I take from this is to just use software that is running locally on the machine, especially when doing presentations. Maybe even have a backup that is a simple PDF that you can show page by page - no animations though but can still show stages of the animation.
- ghaff 1y agoI use Google Slides but I always create a local PDF. I actually find Google Slides has mostly everything I need and not a lot of the chrome that I don't. (Feel the same about Google Docs.) I don't use builds or animations anyway 99% of the time.
- DaSHacka 1y agoThis has been my approach to presentations. If it was originally a google slides document, I download it locally before the presentation time, and even for local .pptx/.odp files I always make sure to export an extra copy in PDF format, just in case. Sometimes, for especially important talks, I even bring two laptops pre-provisioned with the slides just in case one has technical issues for some reason or another. Its not that much extra work, and should the preparations pay off even once makes every bit of the toil well worth it. Nothing worse than embarrassing yourself in a room full of your colleagues, even moreso if the talk will be recorded and posted online for others to witness in perpetuity.
- ghaff 1y agoAt one time, I had some accessories so that I could present from my phone if needed. I think I may even have used it once. But, yes, be prepared both in terms of gear and mentally for glitches. E.g. if your clicker isn't working be ready to smoothly transition to telling the AV team next slide or walking up to your laptop as appropriate.
- user_7832 1y agoTangential but I find modern presentation software bizarrely “broken”. It’s like the xerox (PARC?) “everything is paper” analogy is the only way to do things. Presentations seem to be a way of getting whatever text and photos you want to put, and hope the reader can read between the lines and get value out of it. Just look at powerpoint’s smart art examples for starters… and compare them with any professional published report by any large agency. A medium which allows animations should not be behind a static PDF, yet if you want to make your ppt that polished you need to spend an inordinate amount of time as ppt doesn’t support any of the nicer stuff natively. I haven’t used miro’s extension for powerpoint but I suspect whatever it allows would be far superior to what Microsoft allows natively.
- Etheryte 1y agoIn my opinion, it's a matter of mental framework. Presentations are not meant for a reader, they're meant for an audience, and if you try to make them readable, self contained, you're bound to fail. Presentations work best, or only, really, if they accompany a presenter, not the other way around.
- ghaff 1y agoFor a lot of routine internal corporate stuff, they sort of need to do double duty and the presenter needs to just skip over reading a lot of the fine print. Even if they want to spend the time to create a separate document, most people won't read it. For a conference presentation, I may create speaker notes or include a link to background material but basically I feel no requirement to try to put everything I may talk about on the page.
- andyferris 1y agoMy take PowerPoint slides in private industry is that they are mostly analogous to what academics use poster presentations for. They are narrated to small audiences of 1-10 (maybe 20) people at a time, who might want some notes to read before or share around. IMO like posters they make for terrible presentations to very large groups and I kept questioning the design and purpose, but it seems to work for certain situations.
- uxcolumbo 1y agoFigma has so many things on the go (Sites, Make, etc), I doubt Slides is going to get the investment and TLC it needs. I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files. Prefer apps like Powerpoint or Keynote. Local first and back up to the cloud.
- tobr 1y agoWhat the article describes about Slides, last year’s big new Figma feature, doesn’t inspire confidence in the half-dozen new features from this year.
- kingkongjaffa 1y agoYeah. Figma itself is great. Figjam (digital whiteboarding, sticky notes) is okay, but one might move over to Miro or any other and it wouldn’t really matter which tool you use. Everything else is a distraction. Devs don’t want or need dev mode. Slides doesn’t make any sense, figma and figjam work just fine for presentation. The AI tools are really bad (asking for layouts and stuff using AI in figjam is just broken) Slides was literally made because they realised customers were using figma for presentations. Being a tool native with the story teller is probably better. Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here. The best presentations at every level are a conversation between the presenter (trying to inform or spur a decision to be made) and the audience. I really wished they had gone more the way of Linear - focus on doing a few things really well.
- makeitdouble 1y ago> Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here. At some size, it becomes needed. For the average employee it will come a time they need to convince higher ups of doing something they don't have any plans to do. For managers/VPs they'll need to get people onboard for controversial and widely impacting changes. Rehearsal and a well prepared and presentable message will be needed if you want to put the odds on your side.
- ksec 1y agoSteve Jobs passed away in 2011. 14 Years. His Presentation was legendary. iPhone was introduced in 2007. 18 years. The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007. If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s. And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.
- masklinn 1y ago> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances. I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.
- ghaff 1y agoAnd graphics designers. Maybe I should rehearse, spend more money (normally out of my own pocket as I don't have access to a graphics staff), and otherwise prepare more for a conference presentation, which may be 50 people or fewer. But that's probably not realistic. I think I do a decent job in general. I could probably do better. But everything is a tradeoff.
- wisty 1y agoAlso the slide deck is often dual purpose. Often it's an OK presentation, and an OK document for people who need you to break it into paragraphs and explain each paragraph. Yes, Tufte hated this, because presentations should be presentations, and people should read the accompanying technical report.
- wiseowise 1y agoAnother reason why cloud first is cancer. Every software: * Should operate offline * Should export and work with locally saved (preferably) human readable format
- bloqs 1y ago[flagged]
- bloqs 1y ago[flagged]
- volemo 1y agoAnd there should be no money at all! From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. /s
- bloqs 1y ago[flagged]
- nixpulvis 1y agoIt's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the web.
- bowsamic 1y agoTalks are mission critical. I wouldn’t trust anything other than keynote or a pdf, or PowerPoint at a push
- nixpulvis 1y agoGotta love LaTeX beamer class.
- gherkinnn 1y agoI like how iA Presenter (no affiliation) is based around markdown and telling a story first. The layout is automatic and predictable. Last time I used it, there was no way you have a bullet point list at all. It is limited, but in a good way. And yes, it works offline. https://ia.net/presenter https://ia.net/presenter
- ghaff 1y agoI tried out reveal.js (and then slides.com) for a time. But it felt pretty limiting. And then the company I was with pretty much adopted Google Slides and, especially at the time, I was doing a lot of co-presenting and the collaboration features were really useful.
- 369548684892826 1y agoI've also heard good things about marp [0], and it gets bonus points for being FOSS 0: https://marp.app/ https://marp.app/
- aosaigh 1y agoI love iAPresenter. It definitely has lists and bullets if you want them. I (mis)use it to create proposal PDFs to send to clients. Even though it’s primarily aimed as presentations, it’s a great way to put together quick documents too.
- sunrunner 1y agoReplying to add Deckset (https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/) as a (non-FOSS) option. Deckset and other content-based approaches with automatic layout always seemed like a good way to orient slides around the content instead of futzing with slide transitions for hours.
- immibis 1y ago"IA" sounds like the name of an ironically backwards company trying not to get VC funding in the current year.
- RestartKernel 1y agoSeems like great software, but the website is unfortunately obnoxious. I feel like the overlap between people who would like to create slides in Markdown, and those who would prefer this website over a much simpler alternative, is rather small.
- submeta 1y agoWhen I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of showing densely packed info in one slide after another), I can literally see how my audience is really enjoying the presentation, getting the idea, but then constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc. They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience. Futile. Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.
- seventhtiger 1y agoIn my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own. So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
- _9ptr 1y agoI call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular. And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
- petejodo 1y agoReminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak” https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf
- guidopallemans 1y agoOne thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next. Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
- tyleo 1y agoI make slides directly in the Figma design tool and post images of them into Google Slides. Figma Slides seems to just make everything harder than the default tool.
- sebastiennight 1y agoAs an attendee my personal pet peeve is that an increasing number of my fellow speakers at conferences are now using AI-generated slide decks, which are inevitably full of - unneeded AI visuals and - huge walls of AI prose that are completely impossible to read at a distance I do not understand why those slide-generator startups overdo it so much, when it seems the "one visual per slide" paradigm is both a much better experience for the audience, and would also be so much easier to generate.
- an0malous 1y agoI think the founders of these startups and the users who use their products just don’t care about or notice details. They press a button, see some slides that look nice at a glance, and ship it. They’re vibe working.
- tomsmeding 1y agoThat sounds like a good, easy to spot indicator that these people do not care about quality. :)
- an0malous 1y agomaybe they're right not to though. we're in an era of capitalism where C+ quality maximizes profit efficiency
- codr7 1y agoI can't stand Figma at all, it always misses the point of the exercise by focusing too much on fancy, pixel perfect design.
- volemo 1y agoI like experimenting with my tools, but I wouldn't use any slide creation/presentation software that doesn't allow to export a backup PDF version.
- pjmlp 1y agoTo this day I still don't get folks that instead of using Keynote, PowerPoint, Slides, Impress, do this to themselves using SaaS software created for UI/UX, or whiteboard collaboration. At least reveal.js is understandable due to its programming focus and automating slide generation with multiple output formats.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- KronisLV 1y agoNowadays I export my presentations as PDFs. Even that once failed me. I was to give a presentation about a paper I did at my university and I had used some fonts in it that I rather liked. The problem was that the computer didn't like them (and they weren't actually embedded within the PDF), which lead to all of the text in the presentation being cut off and more or less ruined it. Now it's PDF/A or nothing, thankfully even LibreOffice Impress lets me export those files under File > Export as > Export as PDF > General > Archival (PDF/A, ISO 19005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description No animations or other dynamic content, but for those I can just link to YouTube or show a local MP4 file or whatever. It's simple and hasn't failed me since. Oh also, if a computer at a given place has a web browser, then it's possible to open those files. No other software needed, no logins to web platforms that must be up, nothing.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoI use Miro for presentations because I can lean into my ADHD and just zoom into whatever I want
- rchaud 1y agoThe "Slide Sorter" view in PowerPoint/Keynote/Libre works similarly. High level thumbnail view of your slides, double click to "zoom in" (aka go to the actual slide).
- api 1y agoOther than realtime collab and sync, which could be done in an app with a backing service, is there any reason Figma isn’t an app? Other than: (1) modern devs don’t know how to build anything other than cloud SaaS, and (2) and most importantly it gives you undefeatable DRM and a subscription model?
- ec109685 1y agoDRM protection and Subscription is a powerful motivator: https://x.com/paulg/status/1926227216318296308 https://x.com/paulg/status/1926227216318296308
- Aurornis 1y agoThe strangest part about this disaster is that all of these problems should have been immediately noticed by anyone at Figma actually using the software. A lot of comments are blaming the cloud or cross-platform apps but similar functionality works fine in Figma’s non-slides app. They’ve solved these problems years ago. So why is Slides such a disaster? From the outside, this feels like what some startups do when they hear influencers exaggerate advice about shipping your MVP as fast as possible and everyone rushes to get something launched, no matter how buggy. They forget that real users don’t like being burned by a product that fails when they need it and it’s hard to recover from that. If I project from my own career experience, this is also similar to all the times I’ve been stuck under ladder-climbing executives who thought they could mandate reality and have all the features delivered all at once on an arbitrary deadline they came up with before consulting the engineers. They end up shipping something to avoid the wrath of an executive who demands specific deadlines, then they hope to finish the features and clean up the bugs in production. In my case, the executive in question didn’t actually use the software, so this was the rational way forward within the company if you wanted to look good. And of course, it led to results just like this
- greysteil 1y agoPM at Figma here (for dev tools, not slides). What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable. As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.
- tobr 1y agoRegardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.
- travisgriggs 1y agoWill we always labor under this "it must be a web app" burden? I've written "GUI" software in css/html/javascript, Jetpack Compose, UIKit, Smalltalk, XWindows, WPF, MFC. The web has got to be the worst of all of them when it comes to building UIs that aren't full of weird edge cases and jankiness. It's a frankenstein of committee momentum. You can do some fun/cool things with it, but it's just oh so I know that may be an unpopular position (a younger developer recently told me so), because LOTS of people have invested heavily in skills to try and make this work, but I just don't see it. The single appeal a web app has its potential for cross platform deployment. It has not been my experience that having to write apps in 3 different computer language styles spread across at least two maybe connected CPUs will end up a better overall end user experience than a purpose built single platform executable that leverages the user's host operating system. YMMV
- Aurornis 1y ago> Will we always labor under this "it must be a web app" burden? Figma (the base app) actually works great and has for many years. It does not have these problems. Figma Slides is a new feature they’re pushing. It has these issues because it appears to be unfinished and not well tested. Everyone reaching to blame cross-platform or web technologies is missing the point. Figma can and does ship great apps within this framework. There’s something strange going on within Figma where the slides product is being neglected.
- travisgriggs 1y agoInteresting. I'm in a current development arc that includes some designers that LOVE Figma. They want me to love Figma. It's not bad, I don't hate it. But I don't love it. Oh... and I use the desktop app version. Because it works better.
- anon7000 1y agoWe’ll labor under web until users are so unhappy with it that the business financial benefit of “write once, run everywhere with a team of less specialized, cheaper engineers” is negated by users leaving the platform. But since users broadly don’t care, and it’s a lot cheaper & faster, we’ll keep using web. So it’s just so accessible, that more people will try to use your project in the web as opposed to an app. End user experience is not what drives technical decisions in tech; money does. Anyways, it’s not like apps are dead simple to get right either. It’s still very easy for a team to write a shitty native app. And if you’re writing N apps for N operating systems, without N teams of experienced developers, odds are at least one of those apps will suck. Similarly, a team of experts on the web, given the time & incentive to care about performance, can make incredibly performant web apps. (Not caring about performance and optimizing the experience is a problem with what companies prioritize financially, not with what developers care about.)
- mgaunard 1y agoI do my slides in LaTeX because I can describe my figures as a program so I don't need to redraw things to make minute adjustments.
- habosa 1y agoUntil someone figures out why Slides are an AI product, there’s no way Figma will care about them.
- paradox460 1y agoI still use beamer and latex to make my slide decks, and it's yet to steer me wrong
- PetrBrzyBrzek 1y agoI personally stopped using traditional presentation software altogether. These days, I build all my presentations using vibe coding tools. It might not be the fastest way to create a presentation, but it’s definitely the most fun. Plus, for animations, all you need to do is explain what you want, and most of the time, it just works. I even asked for speaker notes, and I had them ready in three prompts. Magic. If you’re curious, I use Macaly for this (macaly.com).
- gortok 1y agoPost a link to one? Would love to see how they turn out.
- PetrBrzyBrzek 1y agoHere is my last one https://macaly-presentation.vercel.app/ https://macaly-presentation.vercel.app/
- pclmulqdq 1y agoI personally stopped using traditional methods for contributing to discussions altogether. Today, I just spit out thinly veiled ads using LLMs and it might not contribute to the discussion but at least it gets my product out there. If the OP has nothing do with what I'm advertising, even better.
- educasean 1y agoBullet point driven software development always results in apps with terrible UX. Tale as old as time.
- easeout 1y agoThis is in keeping with the overall problem Figma presents to organizations. If you create a place to design software in isolation while eagerly forgetting about real world software concerns, and you bump the seat license cost until only a few can have them, you're going to make early mistakes due to deliberately limited perspective, for which you'll pay later when they're more expensive to correct. Dev mode isn't there to bring in more perspective. It's there to keep the silos separate, for "handoff" rather than really working on it together. Separately: It doesn't matter whether you downloaded the local app, it's thoroughly a SaaS product, and working offline is the exception to its rule.
- My_kent_NURBEK 1y ago[flagged]
- necubi 1y agoPlease do not post LLM comments to HN
- My_kent_NURBEK 1y ago[flagged]
- airstrike 1y agoI think the problem here is less about Figma Slides and more about the pervasive belief that things should be online-first, when reality is by definition offline-first. That's why I'm building a slideshow editor that is fast, cross-platform, offline-first but also viewable online. I can't wait to share it with HN....soon
- bryanhogan 1y agoTried Figma Slides when it came out. It was an unfinished product that was missing core functionality. Figma's new Website Builder is even much worse. I wouldn't put my trust into anything Figma is doing these days. It's still a great app for visual design, but with the current trajectory that might also change soon. Ever since the Adobe incident my trust in them has been greatly reduced.
- rchaud 1y agoFunny enough, you can export a Keynote presentation in HTML and it will work as a local website, with anchor links and everything. The only thing that didn't work when I tried it were animations in Firefox. Chrome and Safari handled them fine.
- righthand 1y ago$1000000 says figma doesn’t E2E test or UAT their software suites and the bug backlog is mostly abandoned vanity features or things cut for release.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoThere's a PM from Figma commenting up above that you might now owe $1000000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152221
- righthand 1y agoI read about dogfooding and buzz about an internal testing chat channel, but no mention of running e2e suites that cover sanity checks or employing real UAT (I don’t consider “ping us in the bug channel” as UAT process).
- fdoifdois 1y ago[flagged]
- rhubarbtree 1y agoKeynote is hands down the best designed piece of software I’ve ever used. Who the hell crafted that level of care into the UX of a presentation app I do not know but it is absolutely next level. It is almost _perfect_. I use Keynote all the time and there are exactly two flaws I’ve noticed, which is insane. (One is a bug when clicking the colour palette sometimes deselects the selected object: the other is that you can’t start with a rectangle and change it to a rounded rectangle) If anyone from the Keynote team reads this, I just want to say - you are absolute heroes.
- armadsen 1y agoI’m a Mac developer and when asked always say that my favorite app of all time is Keynote. It’s just so, so well done, and the epitome of a great Mac app. Would that all software had so much care for UX put into it.
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoIf you are presenting over zoom, you ideally want to put your full screen presentation on one screen (which is shared), and put the zoom screen on the other. So you know who is talking. Maybe look at chat. Keynote, on a dual monitor setup, will takeover both screens, and will not allow something like the above. No options to disable dual screen usage. 5 years post-pandemic, after millions of presentations given over zoom, probably thousands given by Apple's own engineers, this is still not fixed. Even if I make a presentation in keynote, I export to PDF.
- saagarjha 1y agoPretty sure Keynote will let you run the presentation in a window which you can full screen
- quackzar 1y agoAnd if monitor space is a premium or you don't have a second one you can use something like Deskpad (https://github.com/Stengo/DeskPad https://github.com/Stengo/DeskPad) to create a virtual one a window. This is also practical if you want to have the speaker view up.
- rchaud 1y agoPresentations were a solved problem 40 years ago with Hypercard. Regardless of what you use today (PPT, Keynote, LibreOffice Impress), they all do the exact same thing. Figma is following the Dropbox blueprint of building vendor lock-in (who is using Dropbox Paper??), and part of that involves creating senseless roadblocks (can save to local file, can't present locally!) to keep users inside their "ecosystem".
- ryukoposting 1y agoI shall continue to scream it to the clouds: we perfected office software sometime around 2001, and everything since then has either been a sidestep to remain compatible with modern infrastructure, or a step backwards.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- dostick 1y agoFigma has been for a while now designed and built for its investors rather than users. The biggest crime is Figma itself (Figma “design”) which is being redesigned over time to not improve but make it even worse with design decisions that are antithesis of good UIUX practice. And new generations of designers who haven’t seen much else, now take Figma’s design decisions as norm and use that in their work. Nobody asked for figjam and slides, those are created to build growth for investors. Effort spent on those products should have been spent on fixing Figma “design” product. They employ hundreds in customer support. Figma forums is a customer defusal machine giving a sense of attention with “thank you for the feedback” and nothing ever gets fixed. What can you expect from a product that was a result of arbitrary choice by a guy who needed a use case for their real-time JS communication library.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sreekanth850 1y agoGotta respect the guts it takes to run a 100 people presentation on a tool that’s still finding its footing. Big Balls.
- bimguy 1y agoThis whole article reads like a promotion for Apples Keynote masked behind a ridiculous concern "to finally upgrade my presentation tool". I'm guessing he didn't mention that Keynote comes with a price tag of the cheapest Mac computer... while the other is completely free.
- miguel-muniz 1y agoEvery piece of presentation software will eventually flake out on you, I learned long ago that there should always be a plan B. I just make it a habit to always export my presentation as a PDF or PNGs so in the worst case, I can just open it up in Preview and flip through slides.