Skip to main content
dennsi
Active Member
March 4, 2021

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

  • 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 🙂

69 replies

bartvox
September 14, 2023

I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why the Figma app is showing things bigger. Thought it had something to do with my monitor being 5K, but things were still off even after unplugging and rebooting.

It looks like I inadvertantly had my UI scaled at 110%, which was making my canvas bigger too.

+1 for making that setting only scale the UI and not my own designs!

triton
New Member
November 18, 2023

Ok i found kinda more or less “solution”
image

So you can manually find correct scale that almost perfectly match your screen size.
Why almost? Because Figma don’t give me option to do decimals.
Which is bad.
For me it’s not 84%
It should be more like 83.8%
But yeah now Shift+0 with its 100% don’t work for me
Each time i have to manually put number

Neil_Roose
New Participant
December 21, 2023

This is a ridiculous feature that badly needs fixing. How was it implemented to work like this in the first place? It’s actually dangerous as I didn’t realise it was scaling my artboards and prototypes until recently.

Seems these broken rudimentary features will remain broken forever whilst Figma tends to adding more bells and whistles that excite amateurs but are useless to professionals.

Another nail in the coffin.

MakePixelsWork
Active Member
December 28, 2023

Yeah. We need another 645 upvotes for this to even get considered by the development team.

February 18, 2024

this worked for me in FF on a Macbook Pro

March 21, 2024

where can I see this page? I couldn’t find General page anywhere. Also, are you using the desktop app or is it online?

hhpark
April 25, 2024

Oh… You saved me. Thank you! 😘

triton
New Member
July 21, 2024

FOUND THE SOLUTION!
Right click your Figma and put this at the end
/high-dpi-support=1 /force-device-scale-factor=1

Do it like that:

triton
New Member
July 21, 2024

Found it here:

Windows Report – 12 Jul 22

It’s about chrome scaling issues (Because I also had problems with that, when tried to measure UI thing from screenshot) but apparently it will work in any windows app.

dennsi
dennsiAuthor
Active Member
July 22, 2024

That may be a workaround fix for the Windows app but it is not the general solution to the problem. Many people use Figma in their browsers or on different OS (e.g. the MacOS Desktop App).