Active Member

Change Interface Scale (or just Figma's UI font scale)

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 4, 2021
69 replies
21689 views

Hey there! 👋

It always has bothered me that Figma’s general UI is slightly too tiny / has very small font sizes and I hoped that View>Interface Scale would solve this issue. Figma’s small font size and icon size make it quite difficult to navigate through the app without having hawk eyes. Sometimes elements (especially in Effects menu) are small click targets.
Scaling the Interface up seems like a good idea to counter this and improve readability and clickability.
Unfortunately at this rate, it’s not a real solution for me. It is pretty much useless to me since it also scales your designs / the canvas. I’d like to scale the UI (Sidebars, Top Bar) only and keep my design canvas untouched to remain at an actual 100% scale.

The current behaviour doesn’t make much sense to me. If I’m designing for example a screen at 1920px width I’d like to see an actual 1920px screen. My work depends on the canvas representing the pixels at 1:1 / @1x scale. Sure, a workaround could be to view the canvas in something else than 100% to counteract it visually – but let’s be honest:
This is not the way. (Read this in mandalorian voice)

Maybe you could implement an option to adjust the scale of Figma’s UI not in terms of everything in general but instead just the font and icon sizes of menus (sidebars, plugins etc. you name it) which won’t affect the canvas itself.

Looking forward to improvements 🙂

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user120

Thank you! As you helped a lot

Ger

@dennsi Hey, I dunno whether you still experience that issue, but I do 🙂 so I wrote a quick userstyle for myself - it’s on userstyles.world or google figma-ui-font-size-and-family-change Prob will stop working when the CSS gets recompiled (I have no idea how often that happens) but it’s better than nothing I guess. I might look into regular expressions to make it better. (As far as I can see it does not affect the canvas.)

Richard_Schumann_scco

When i set up a frame lets say 1400px width
and then i measure ( cmd + shift + 4 ) on my mac
how much pixel this is :

1050px on 50% zoom scale
2100px on 100% zoom scale

on my apple pro XDR display ( native res ).

this is because i zoom in a bit in browser to have the UI readable ( as its pretty small on a 6k display ) … but i obviously just want to have the UI bigger but not the artboard.

is there some hack / workarround ?

mattaningram

New Participant

Oof now that I realize this is happening it is so bad. Changing interface scale should NOT change how things render in the canvas.

I was wondering why identical dimension items in browser vs Figma were rendering at different sizes. Now I have to see Figma UI in absurdly large size just to see my canvas at correct size.

Please fix this Figma!

Massimo_Todaro

You saved me from buying more powerful glasses! thanks broh

Isa1

Thaaaaanks! Me estaba volviendo loca!

IraX

Power Member

This has bothered me since day one. Obv it’s also a matter of your screen res too but yes the panels and UI are tiny. The biggest thing I struggle with most regularly is spacing between elements – reading the little white number in the red box is just too difficult.

When I have to manage layers and/or do Auto Layout work I crank up the scaling then reset back to 0 but that is a pain.

For me ideally it would be scaling everything except the canvas/frames and their contents, but include the spacing size.

MakePixelsWork

Active Member

Its been almost a year since @Josh commented… but no updates yet.

I too find it odd that if I zoom in the interface, the canvas also scales up. An 800px image suddenly is seen as 880px… or a whole frame of your 1920-1080 screen is increased by the percentage chosen.

Can we please ONLY zoom in the interface and NOT the canvas?

Thank you!