Hello! I feel that there should be a option to set a “default” or “display” variant for components, which shows at all times while viewing instances within Edit/Dev views of Figma pages. Perhaps a checkbox or a toggle which allows this to happen, so if it is left unchecked the component acts as normal.
Perhaps someone could provide some information on what the best practices are for solving this problem that I have, or else I suppose this post should stand as a feature request.
The reason being is that for components which have complex animations built into them using variants as keyframes, the first frame of the animation may not properly represent the purpose of the whole component when it is viewed outside of “Present” mode. The component may be blank when viewing in Edit/Dev mode, but when presenting the content animates in. Here is an example:
It appears blank when viewing outside of Present Mode.
The content appears, but only if I manually set the instance to be Variant 2 (which means that the animation is no longer visible in Present mode).
I could work around this by employing some conditional interactions or by simply making the animation in After Effects and exporting the whole screen as a GIF/MP4/WEBM, but that is much more work than I think is necessary for displaying some simple animations wihtout causing confusion among my coworkers when they see blank screens in my Figma file.
That is all, thankyou!