Figma Slides

Announcement post: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-slides/

At 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.)

What 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'.

Designers 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.

Hell, 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.

I 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

Funny, 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.

I 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

Figma 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.

Packaging 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.

All 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.

What 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?

Tried 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.

Their landing page does not really show much about this product. It looks just like boring powerpoint.

Figma invested years in this super powerful real time canvas, only using it for UX mocks is not tapping its full potential

Wow… 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.

Figma has a reputation with its dark patterns for pricing - people might be wary before adopting their products.

Wow, it supports WebP images.

Google Slides doesn't support WebP, despite google being the company that _invented_ WebP.

In what way would Figma be better for creating slide decks than Canva?

How much they will charge for something we can already do?

Its 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

Played 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.

Funny..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.

Seems like a slam dunk idea for Figma

This 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.

Does 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.

I 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!!

Does this export to PowerPoint?

Great 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

A 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?

I use Inkscape with Sozi to create some nice slides.

I'm really happy with this, so we can move our company presentations to Figma and move out of Google Slides, specially for Product.

I’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!

Figma, allow us to do local changes even when files are read-only, so we can fix last minute stuff before exporting to svg.

Seems like Figma and Miro are converging a bit but from different directions

Combining the best of Google Slides and Apple Keynote

This does not work in Firefox really well.

iA Writer also added presentations recently. Seems like presentation software is getting popular again.

Meanwhile, 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

Wow this is really cool

Now the question is will there be offline mode that works with embedded videos so one can do a proper conference talk.

Make ppt more fun

This 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.

It 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.

For 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