Some highlights and lowlights.
I think of presentation slides as having 3 main jobs:
- Emphasize key points, so people remember
- Break up complex concepts, so people learn
- Entertain, so people pay attention
This calls for slides that are mostly images or very short phrases. A minority of slides justify designing something to match the vibe or illustrate a point – a diagram, for example. This can mean going back and forth between Keynote and, say, Figma, but it’s worth the effort.
This year I’ve been spending a lot of time in Figma, so when I was recently asked to speak at an event I thought, “Why not try Figma Slides?” Figma Slides launched a year back, and graduated from beta in March. I’ve used Keynote for almost 20 years now – it seemed like time for me to finally upgrade my presentation tool.
So I gave it a whirl.
Pretty quickly, I liked building slides right in Figma. The Grid view made it easy for me to structure my ideas. Features like Auto Layout and Components made building slides that adapt to different text and images a snap.
For example, a key point in my talk was that selecting a JavaScript framework can be overwhelming. It was easy to build a quick visual of this right in the deck.
Components and Auto Layout made this 10x faster to build in Figma than Keynote.
Admittedly, Figma Slides is missing some Keynote features that I think of as pretty essential.
For example, Keynote has long had a toggle to “Autosize Text”, which will set an object’s font size to just big enough to fill its container. There’s no way to do this in Figma’s auto layout because Figma only wants to support layouts that CSS Grid can implement. That constraint makes sense when designing for the web, but shows how hard it is to expand a design tool to other domains.
Another odd omission is that you can’t easily create a slide where items (e.g. bullets, sections of a diagram) appear with each click. The closest you can do is to split them into different layers, add a “Fade” animation of 1 millisecond on each, then reorder the animation order to match the order they appear o
15 Comments
lauritz
I think there is opportunity for a more design-oriented tool in this space. I tried pitch.com a while back and was a heavy Google Slides user for a while, but, like the author, I keep coming back to Keynote.
What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.
daemin
The lesson I take from this is to just use software that is running locally on the machine, especially when doing presentations. Maybe even have a backup that is a simple PDF that you can show page by page – no animations though but can still show stages of the animation.
user_7832
Tangential but I find modern presentation software bizarrely “broken”. It’s like the xerox (PARC?) “everything is paper” analogy is the only way to do things.
Presentations seem to be a way of getting whatever text and photos you want to put, and hope the reader can read between the lines and get value out of it. Just look at powerpoint’s smart art examples for starters… and compare them with any professional published report by any large agency.
A medium which allows animations should not be behind a static PDF, yet if you want to make your ppt that polished you need to spend an inordinate amount of time as ppt doesn’t support any of the nicer stuff natively.
I haven’t used miro’s extension for powerpoint but I suspect whatever it allows would be far superior to what Microsoft allows natively.
uxcolumbo
Figma has so many things on the go (Sites, Make, etc), I doubt Slides is going to get the investment and TLC it needs.
I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files.
Prefer apps like Powerpoint or Keynote. Local first and back up to the cloud.
ksec
Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. 14 Years. His Presentation was legendary. iPhone was introduced in 2007. 18 years.
The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007.
If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s.
And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.
wiseowise
Another reason why cloud first is cancer.
Every software:
* Should operate offline
* Should export and work with locally saved (preferably) human readable format
bowsamic
Talks are mission critical. I wouldn’t trust anything other than keynote or a pdf, or PowerPoint at a push
gherkinnn
I like how iA Presenter (no affiliation) is based around markdown and telling a story first. The layout is automatic and predictable. Last time I used it, there was no way you have a bullet point list at all. It is limited, but in a good way. And yes, it works offline.
https://ia.net/presenter
submeta
When I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of showing densely packed info in one slide after another), I can literally see how my audience is really enjoying the presentation, getting the idea, but then constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc.
They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience.
Futile.
Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.
tyleo
I make slides directly in the Figma design tool and post images of them into Google Slides. Figma Slides seems to just make everything harder than the default tool.
sebastiennight
As an attendee my personal pet peeve is that an increasing number of my fellow speakers at conferences are now using AI-generated slide decks, which are inevitably full of
– unneeded AI visuals
and
– huge walls of AI prose that are completely impossible to read at a distance
I do not understand why those slide-generator startups overdo it so much, when it seems the "one visual per slide" paradigm is both a much better experience for the audience, and would also be so much easier to generate.
codr7
I can't stand Figma at all, it always misses the point of the exercise by focusing too much on fancy, pixel perfect design.
volemo
I like experimenting with my tools, but I wouldn't use any slide creation/presentation software that doesn't allow to export a backup PDF version.
pjmlp
To this day I still don't get folks that instead of using Keynote, PowerPoint, Slides, Impress, do this to themselves using SaaS software created for UI/UX, or whiteboard collaboration.
At least reveal.js is understandable due to its programming focus and automating slide generation with multiple output formats.
KronisLV
Nowadays I export my presentations as PDFs.
Even that once failed me. I was to give a presentation about a paper I did at my university and I had used some fonts in it that I rather liked. The problem was that the computer didn't like them (and they weren't actually embedded within the PDF), which lead to all of the text in the presentation being cut off and more or less ruined it.
Now it's PDF/A or nothing, thankfully even LibreOffice Impress lets me export those files under File > Export as > Export as PDF > General > Archival (PDF/A, ISO 19005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description
No animations or other dynamic content, but for those I can just link to YouTube or show a local MP4 file or whatever. It's simple and hasn't failed me since. Oh also, if a computer at a given place has a web browser, then it's possible to open those files. No other software needed, no logins to web platforms that must be up, nothing.