51–60 of 179 posts
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
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 usin…
As 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 "Microsof…
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.
For architecture diagrams Ive found Google drawing will work for my use cases. And if its something fancy, lucidchart.
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.…
All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations. Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work. I…
I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.
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> 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.
There's useful animations—guiding the audience that something has changed for ex. Then there's the terrible animations—a gif of a meme playing in an infinite loop. These make the slide unwatchable for me.
Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and then the whole thing. Subtly animating the new line in is a great way to highlight what's changing. Double-so if I'm reordering lines. Otherwise the code is just flashing from one state to another and it's not always obvious what happened.
Even better, I sometimes want to walk through the execution of code. I love having a red arrow highlighting what line we're on, and animating it between positions is a good way to highlight that we're moving from one thing to the next, especially with non-linear jumps (like from the end of a loop back to the top).
Animation is an easily-abused tool, but it's also a powerful one.
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As 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 "Microsof…
Interesting. 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.
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.
Just 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.
I thought this space is pretty saturated is this essentially just to capture and lock in more users into a single tool?
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I would definitely use Draw.io over Google Drawings. That sounds a bit masochistic to be honest!
Google Drawings was the bees knees 15 years ago, and since it is a dead product and hasn't changed one bit today it isn't. We use excalidraw a lot, but my excitement has waned a bit there as well.
In a way it felt to me like Excalidraw works around your diagrams not looking very good by just making them obviously not intended to look good. But Draw.io solves that problem by just making them actually look good.
The only issue I have with Draw.io is that it can't export text in SVG properly - every text object is really an embedded HTML element, which means you can only view the resulting SVGs in browsers. They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF). https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems
It doesn't seem like they care about solving that problem properly unfortunately. Their "solution" is:
> "Convert Labels to SVG" transmits the diagram to our servers, generates a PDF, then pipes that through Inkscape, and returns the SVG output.
Jesus.
Aside from that it's an amazing program. A worthy successor to Dia.