Add feature to disable Anti-Aliasing entirely

Hey @pcote, thanks for the feedback and apologies for the delayed reply!

We’ll pass this idea onto our team for future consideration.

Agree 100% but my concern is with font fidelity on Pixel based fonts.

Pixel fonts are very important to be crisp. Currently not being able to turn AA off means any work with pixel fonts means it has to be done in other software!

This a bump to this request. I use figma to design ESL-templates (Electronic Shelve Label). These are e-ink devices without anti-aliasing.  Direct export to 8bit gif or png would be great.

It's a shame that over a year has passed, and the situation is still the same.

Same here. I design for e-ink displays with limited color support (usually three or four), and the ability to disable anti-aliasing would be an essential feature.

​@djv 

​@Salavat Abdullin ​@Robert Grund ​@begreen ​@Eunmac ​@pcote I’m curious if our export settings are meeting your needs here? Under the more menu, you can switch from Detailed to Basic. In my experience, it seems to be what y’all are looking for. 

@Rogie_King Thanks for the reply! I wasn't aware of that function, so I tested it straight away — unfortunately it doesn't seem to work for me. I'm still getting anti-aliasing with these settings (see left). What I'm after is that hard pixel effect with font hinting. The preview on the right was forced in Photoshop (indexed color), but it doesn't accurately represent actual e-ink — some of the finer details in the fonts get lost.

​@Rogie_King Thank you for the reply, but “anti-aliasing” is not the same as “bicubic resampling”. Here you can see the comparison. What we need is an option to deactivate anti-aliasing. 

The e-ink mention above is the exact same problem in a different room, and honestly both of you are describing something that should not be this hard.

Working on pixel-precise output in Figma means fighting the tool at every layer — how it renders on canvas, how it handles object edges, and then again at export. It is not one setting. It is the whole pipeline working against you by default.

A global AA off switch probably is not coming though. Aseprite already owns that space and Figma has been moving in the opposite direction for years. Which means we are on our own finding the workarounds — and there are a few that actually help.

• The thing I wish I had known first: Pixel Preview at 1x is the honest view. What you see there is what you are getting out. If edges are soft in preview, no export setting downstream fixes it. Check this before you export, not after.
• After that: Basic resampling on PNG export. Detailed is the default and it silently blends pixel edges on the way out. Switching to Basic made a visible difference for me on any frame with actual pixel work.
• The last one catches people out: all the layer edges need to be on whole pixels, not just the outer frames. An e-ink vector sitting at 43.7px will anti-alias regardless of everything else you do right.

For vector-heavy work specifically, drawing shapes in Figma rather than placing pre-made PNGs, Vector Pixel Art has been the one that actually works for me. It rewrites vector edges to hard pixel boundaries before export so the PNG lands clean. Free tier covers most workflows.

Pixel fonts are still the rough corner I have not fully cracked. If anyone has cracked that one, genuinely curious.

​@pcote  are you working with vectors natively or mostly placing finished pixel tiles? Changes what is actually useful here.