Figma Slides feedback so far
I’ve worked in Slides for a few hours now and have run into some bugs and possible quality-of-life improvements that could be made. I think the product has a lot of potential so far, for what it’s worth! It’s off to a great start and I think it will be super helpful for me.
Good things
- The default unstyled slides provided by Figma are simple and high-quality. They’re working great as a basis for building my own custom template. Would love to have more diagrams available in the official library Figma provides.
QOL improvements
Command + R doesn’t work to rename layers, and you can’t batch rename layers. As a layer-namer this has broken my flow a lot.Implemented- Managing the text styles has been a little weird, because the editing features seem to be split between slides mode and design mode. I understand that once I have the design and styles set up the idea is probably that I won’t need to edit them in design mode too much (thus keeping slides mode UI cleaner and more focused on content), but since I’m making a new template I have had to bounce back and forth between the modes to update the text styles with the level of granularity that I want.
- Using color variables from external libraries is a little weird. The variables can be applied in design mode, but when I’m back in slides mode the variables aren’t referenced, and they appear as raw HEX values. Not sure if this is the intended behavior or not, or what best practice would be.
- I can’t pull in a library unless it has at least one published component in it. This was a problem because I have a general purpose library that I use which consists only of color variables, and I had to publish a dummy component in order to pull the color variables into Slides.
- I haven’t figured out an easy way to apply the same layout grids to every slide. I can copy them from slide to slide but this has been a pain in-practice. I find myself setting the same grids manually over and over.
- The behavior of frames with constraints applied to them automatically snapping to layout grids has felt a little weird in practice. I realize this is a super old Figma frames behavior that is often desirable but as it’s happening in Slides it’s not always what I expect to happen, and I’m not sure that people who aren’t familiar with layout grids would understand what is happening here.
- I don’t have an exhaustive list, but not all of the selection hotkeys that I’m used to in Figma design files are available and that’s slowing me down.
- By default, slides have that rounded edge in the editor, but that’s not always what I want to see, even if they are not rounded in presentation mode. And, when I export flat images of the slides, the corners are rounded in the exported image and that’s definitely not what I want.
Bugs
Every once in a while, the list of slides in the left pane disappears and I need to refresh the file to get them to reappear. Unsure what I’m doing that causes it to disappear but it’s happened 4–5 times.Potentially fixed, haven’t experienced in a whileAlignment hotkeys don’t always work—especially when I am aligning to the slide boundaries.Seems to be fixedI can only zoom out so far. Possibly the intended behavior?Not an issue for me anymoreHolding Alt to measure distance between objects only works for measuring between objects, and not to the edges of the slide. This has made it tricky sometimes to position items relative to the slide edges.Seems to be fixed
Edited: Struck out some of my original items which have now been addressed.