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dennsi
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

    Show previous replies
    itsViney
    itsViney
    New Member
    July 22, 2024

    Thank you! This had been driving me mad. I’d create a 1700x800 frame in Figma, set my canvas zoom level to 100%, grab a cropped screenshot of the frame on my screen and the actual size would be completely different from the size I’d defined. Adding this flag to the shortcut fixed the issue for me. Now the size I see on my display is the actual size of the design. 👍

    Tin_Wu
    Tin_Wu
    July 23, 2024

    Same here…interface zoom should be separated from Frame zoom.

      Eric_Weir1
      Eric_Weir1
      July 25, 2024

      Scaling the interface should not scale all the elements on the canvas.

      I thought that’s why there’s a very incremental and pinpointed zoom function specifically for the canvas and an explicit option to scale the “interface”?!

      It literally makes no sense. Why would anyone want to see a design at a specific percentage, say “100%” but have it actually rendering at a magnifier set at the interface level?

      Scaling the UI is a common feature in most “design” apps. I’ll even give kudos to Adobe here as you can scale all their interfaces independently of the canvas.

      Somehow I have a feeling this is because the Figma app isn’t native to any OS. Either way it’s a huge gap for all users, let alone those with accessibility considerations.

      Please address this Figma.

        Tiptop_Type
        Tiptop_Type
        July 29, 2024

        Agree with everyone that scaling the interface should only affect the menus, not the scale of the artwork itself (since that makes “100%” zoom completely misleading, which can completely mess up designs!). It’s been 3 years since this issue has been posted… at minimum, can you warn users when they change the Interface scale that they are also scaling their artwork? I shudder to think of the headache this could have caused me if I had noticed any later!! Thanks for your consideration!

          mattaningram
          mattaningram
          New Participant
          July 29, 2024

          I see so many designers get confused by this.

          It’s so basic though. Interface scale should ONLY SCALE THE INTERFACE. Not the canvas itself. It should scale on-canvas UI elements like the size inspectors and frame names, but not the frame rendering itself.

          Come on Figma!

            mattaningram
            mattaningram
            New Participant
            October 22, 2024

            This is still not fixed. Not even acknowledged by Figma.

              NicolasG
              NicolasG
              New Member
              February 6, 2025

              Where’s the link to upvote the request? (as if accessibility features should be develop depending on the amount of people needing them -_-)

              Userinterfacer
              Userinterfacer
              March 26, 2025

              Commenting for visibility. There seems to be many duplicate issues in this forum, including for this one, and this causes the likes to be scattered, making it difficult for the developers to notice the most requested issues. 

               

                Dave_Whitley
                Dave_Whitley
                New Participant
                October 3, 2025

                +1 please fix

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