Mia: Alright, so I came across this wild story about someone ditching Keynote for Figma Slides, thinking it was gonna be this huge upgrade, right? Turns out, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. So, to kick things off, what's the deal with slide decks anyway? Like, what are they actually supposed to *do*? I heard there are three big jobs.
Mars: Yeah, a slide deck really has three main gigs. First, it’s gotta hammer home the key points, make ‘em stick in people’s minds. Second, it’s gotta break down complex stuff so everyone actually gets it. And third, you gotta keep it entertaining, keep the audience hooked.
Mia: Emphasize, clarify, entertain. Got it. But isn’t that a tough balancing act? How do you not just overload the slides?
Mars: Totally is. That’s why the advice is usually tons of images or super short phrases. Only a few slides, when you really need to, like, diagram something or set a mood, get the full design treatment. Think of it like a meal: you got your light, easy-to-digest courses, but then, boom, you hit ‘em with a rich dish – a diagram, a custom graphic – to really make a point.
Mia: Ooh, I like that analogy. So, sprinkle those richer slides in sparingly.
Mars: Exactly. If every slide’s got a dense diagram, people are gonna zone out. But if you drop a well-designed visual at just the right moment, bam, it sticks.
Mia: Okay, so a balanced deck. Now, about Figma Slides. This person had been using Keynote for, like, two decades, then decided to give Figma a whirl. What was his first impression?
Mars: He was really digging building in Figma. The Grid view helped him brainstorm super fast. And Auto Layout and Components meant he could swap out text or images and everything would just snap into place. He even built a Choose Your Fighter screen for JavaScript frameworks right there in the deck. Said it was ten times faster than doing it in Keynote, no jumping back and forth to Photoshop.
Mia: Ten times faster? Wow. Okay, so, I'm not really a design tool kinda guy, can you break down what Auto Layout and Components actually *do*?
Mars: Think of Auto Layout like a smart container on a webpage: you drop in a headline, a subheading, a button, and it automatically arranges the spacing and alignment. Components are reusable design elements. Build a standard slide header, a button, turn it into a component. Change the master component once, and every instance updates. It’s like a Keynote template, but way more flexible and web-friendly.
Mia: That makes sense. So, for design-heavy decks, Figma Slides felt like a big step up. But, obviously, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. What was missing compared to Keynote?
Mars: A couple of things stick out. First, Keynote has Autosize Text: it scales the font to fill the container. Figma’s Auto Layout doesn’t do that because it’s sticking with what CSS Grid supports. Second, animating bullets or diagram parts to appear one by one? Not easy. The workaround is splitting items into layers, adding a one-millisecond fade on each, then manually reordering the animations. It’s… involved.
Mia: One-millisecond fades and manual reordering? Sounds like a nightmare. Why does Figma limit text autosizing like that?
Mars: Figma's built on web standards. CSS Grid can’t auto-resize fonts to fill a box. Makes sense for website layouts, but when you drag that tool into presentations, you hit these gaps. It's a design choice: stay web-native or add special slide features.
Mia: So they went with staying web-native. Okay, now for the real train wreck: the live presentation. What went south when he hit Present?
Mars: Oh, man, a bunch of stuff. He rehearsed offline, saved a local copy, the whole deal. Turns out Save Local Copy doesn’t let you present locally. Go offline, click Present, you get Error -106. And once you actually get into Present mode, no full-screen shortcut, no display swap shortcut. Just a little pop-up window you gotta drag and maximize yourself. Oh, and the mouse? Stays visible over the slide, like it's 1999.
Mia: Dragging a pop-up onto the projector? That’s a showstopper at a meetup. But he got it started, right? What was the biggest fail?
Mars: The animations tanked. He had this complex slide with seven build steps. On stage, he clicked twice per step, trying to advance. Instead, the audience saw a blank slide. Fourteen clicks later, Figma finally jumped to the next slide. Then he had to click back to show the complete slide. He just stumbled through, explaining all seven points at once.
Mia: Ouch. That’s gotta mess with your timing—and your credibility.
Mars: Totally. In a room of a hundred friendly people, they cut him some slack. But imagine that in a keynote hall? It’d kill the flow. And he had no way to recover or skip the broken animation.
Mia: If you were on the Figma team, what’s the first thing you’d fix to stop this from happening again?
Mars: Offline reliability is critical. They need a real download and present feature, period. No internet check at Present, zero errors. Then the animation workflow needs a simple build order interface, not a layer hack. And, real full-screen and display switching shortcuts, because every pro tool has them.
Mia: Totally. Let's dig into those offline quirks a bit more. He said the local copy wasn’t enough. How does that stack up against Keynote?
Mars: Keynote, you save a .key file, open it, no network needed. Figma, you can export a local copy, but it's basically a static file you can't present. They say it’ll work offline, but the second you hit Present without a connection, it throws a fit. Worse, try to download the presentation while presenting, closing the tab undownloads it. It's a fragile mess.
Mia: That’s like pulling the rug out from under you. Couldn’t they just bundle the whole slide deck into a single HTML or PDF for offline use?
Mars: They could. Embed all the assets in a package with a local engine to render the slides, no browser tab needed. More work, but that’s what presentation tools should guarantee.
Mia: And then the animations. Why are builds so important in a talk?
Mars: Builds control the pacing. You introduce a bullet point, talk about it, then click for the next. Keeps the audience focused on the current thing. Without builds, you either reveal everything at once – overwhelming – or reveal nothing – confusing. So, slide-by-slide timing is essential.
Mia: He ended up clicking seventeen times to explain seven points. Aside from being annoying, could that kind of glitch actually hurt the message?
Mars: Absolutely. It shifts the focus to your tool failing instead of your content. In his case, he joked that it proved his point – boring, reliable tech is underrated – but that’s a risky bet. Most speakers won’t have that punchline handy.
Mia: Which brings us to the big takeaway: boring technology is good technology. How did he wrap that up in his conclusion?
Mars: He contrasted Keynote’s age and quirks with its rock-solid reliability. Apple treats presentations as mission-critical; they squash every bug. Figma, as a newer player branching out, seems less focused on that. His messy demo just hammered home the point: stability beats novelty when you’re in front of an audience.
Mia: So, when picking tools, it’s a trade-off between innovation and reliability?
Mars: Exactly. New features are cool, but if they fail at the critical moment, you lose your audience’s trust. Boring tools that just work might not be flashy, but they let you focus on your message, not the software.
Mia: That’s a lesson worth remembering. Thanks for breaking all that down. It sounds like Figma Slides has potential for building decks, but it’s not quite ready for the big leagues yet.
Mars: Agreed. It’s fun and powerful for design, but until they iron out the offline and animation kinks, Keynote's the safer bet.
Mia: Well, here’s to boring tech that simply works. Amen to that.
