Active Member

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

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 4, 2021
69 replies
21646 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 🙂

Share an idea

dennsiAuthor

Active Member

Not sure if it’s relevant but I’m using the App in Firefox 86.0 (64bit) and native Desktop App 95.8 both on macOS 10.15.7. If the behaviour I described is a bug instead of a feature 🙂

Looking forward to more activity here…

Gleb

Power Member

This is more about how it’s implemented in the browser than someone specifically designing this feature this way: instead of adding a complex setting for changing the UI (CSS) somehow, they are using the default browser capabilities to scale the whole website. And I’ve seen some people who find it really helpful that it scales the canvas as well.

But your point is totally valid too, it would be nice to have this option, so feel free to edit your topic and move it to #product-ideas so other people can vote for your suggestion (maybe change the title to fit this category better too). I would suggest something like “Change Figma UI font scale”.

dennsiAuthor

Active Member

Thank you Gleb – I changed the title and moved it to #product-ideas as well.

I understand that browser scaling is probably a reason, even in the native app since it’s likely just an Electron app.

dennsiAuthor

Active Member

Can’t believe no one else is bothered by this.

Calvin_K

I am!! Doing the opposite but the same problem.
I want to Reduce the scale of sidebars / tool panels without scaling the canvas area (so I can have more canvas area).

The workaround of reduce/enlarge interface + view zooming actually has another very detrimental side effect → it messes up the antialiasing and text smoothing. On my mac the work around makes everything look horrendous (fuzzy and blurry edges) in the canvas. It brings tears to my eyes, in a bad way.

I am using the desktop app, so hopefully not confined to web browsers capability.

Austen_Morgan

New Member

The interface and design scales really need to be separate. I thought this was a bug when I first noticed it.

O

Oleksandr_Valius1

Just discovered this by myself. Thought that this is some bug that the 1000px width rectangle had 900px on the screenshot. Turn out interface scale affects image overall. Hope this bug will be fixed