Live data from Hacker News

Figma Slides

figma.com

151–160 of 179 posts

Re: Figma Slides

#151

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.

Counterpoint: 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.

Powerpoint'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.

Re: Figma Slides

#152
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'.

Re: Figma Slides

#154
post #152

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 presenta…

This 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.

Re: Figma Slides

#155
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.

Re: Figma Slides

#156
post #152

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 presenta…

This 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.

I'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?

Re: Figma Slides

#157

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

I 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.

What 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.

Re: Figma Slides

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).

> Numbers is better than Excel ??????? Nothing is better than Excel.

fair point :)

Re: Figma Slides

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).

Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.

I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.

Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.

Re: Figma Slides

#160
post #152

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 presenta…

This 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.

I’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.

Post reply on HN