Co-founders of Sketch shared their stance on AI: ​“We’re not ready to make a move with AI just yet — for reasons that will become clear. However, we wanted to share the principles that will guide our approach when that time comes.”

I respect their position on using AI to aid designers but never to create designs. To me, Make Design was the least exciting AI feature announced at Config, and I’m glad it was reframed as the First Draft during the relaunch a few weeks ago. Their focus on privacy and being local-first is a smart way to differentiate from Figma and offer something unique, even if that required burying Sketch Cloud first.

I didn’t know I needed this until I saw it. Plan the presentation in FigJam, then turn it into a deck outline in Slides: ​“Think it in FigJam, present it in Figma: create a Figma Slides outline from a FigJam board with a few clicks.”

The Foundation generates Figma spacing, color, and typography variables based on Tailwind CSS’s utilities, ensuring consistency across your design and code.

In this webinar, Designer Advocates Corey Lee and Hugo Raymond will guide you through communicating effectively through story-driven presentations and share techniques to up-level your slide designs to make your presentations and decks more compelling. ​“Good design tells a compelling story. How you convey that story can significantly impact its resonance with your audience.“

Delighted to see the internal name sneaking into a shortcut for creating a new Slides deck! BTW, both figjam.new and figma.new have also been around for a while. 

“You can get the attention of your audience and better communicate your ideas by turning them into simple, compelling stories. Join this livestream with Janis Ozolins to learn the principles of visual communication and see how to create compelling visuals in Figma Slides in a few easy steps.“

“Come learn the basics of how to use Figma Slides to communicate with your team and present to stakeholders. You’ll learn how to create, edit, and polish a Slide deck and how to present to your stakeholders.”

“Figgy instantly turns your FigJam into a website. You get a published site, with a clean domain and custom SEO. All you have to do is drop in your Figma link and it’s live. No coding or technical experience is required.” Read how this project came to life in this Twitter thread.

So much polish has been added to FigJam in the last few weeks! Now, you can change the color of connectors and their text independently.

“Watch this recording to learn how to up-level your team’s presentations by creating beautiful, functional custom templates in Figma Slides. You’ll learn about how to use advanced features in Figma Slides, how to publish your templates, and best practices for designing decks for your team.”

“Join Damien Correll, Figma’s Creative Director, to learn about what makes a good story, how to shape your stories, how to design slides to let your story shine, and common slide design mistakes to avoid.”

Small improvements to FigJam keep coming — now connectors can connect to the edge or arbitrary spots on an object, not just the NSEW cardinal directions.

Nathan A Curtis maintained ~2,000 slides worth of workshops and talks in Figma for four years, so his feedback on Figma Slides is worth listening to. His biggest complaint is a lack of templates and styles on the Professional plan, but in the replies Slides PM Mihika Kapoor confirmed that Pro templates are coming soon.

Slides PM Mihika Kapoor shares how to run the perfect product review using Figma Slides. You’ll learn best practices for getting the input you need, driving decisions, and aligning stakeholders around the work.

Quality-of-life improvement in FigJam — regardless of connector and shape styling, they will always have the same optical spacing. Also, alignment indicators now appear only when needed and are hidden when the object is being moved across the board. So much cleaner!

After giving Slides a good try, Raquel Piqueras shares a few things she has been missing — a simple timer, access to sharing settings from the open presentation, slide-level components, and hotkeys to streamline the work.

The last of the ten newly announced features — hide slides to skip them!

A behind-the-scenes look into the journey of launching Figma Slides. As Mihika noted, this talk could be considered the other half of her podcast with Lenny on building zero-to-one products from a few months ago.

Day 8. Improved language support in the Tone Dial.

Day 9 brings new slick transition controls to customize the duration, easing curve, delay, etc.