The Pragmatic Engineer podcast: ​“How do you take a new product idea, and turn it into a successful product? Figma Slides started as a hackathon project a year and a half ago – and today it’s a full-on product, with more than 4.5M slide decks created by users. I’m joined by two founding engineers on this project: Jonathan Kaufman and Noah Finer.” Read two interesting takeaways from this episode on X.

Figma Slides is now out of beta and available to everyone with six major new updates: import and export .pptx files, object animations, slide numbers, components, and video improvements. Learn about new features from Noah Finer’s video or read how other teams adopted Slides to tap into a design system, use branded assets, improve collaboration, and get audience feedback.

The public rollout comes with a great commercial. Epic to see Soren Iverson in the main role!

While this video focuses on education, all examples can be easily translated into the work setting. Five creative ways to use pages in FigJam to bring structure, clarity, and collaboration: give each collaborator their own page, set up digital breakout rooms, organize content step-by-step, create resource boards, and keep everything in one spot for easy planning.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Rehearse is a clever plugin for Figma Slides — practice your presentation and see exactly how long you spent on each slide and the total time for your deck.

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

A new sidebar provides a large collection of diagramming shapes for engineers, along with quick access to recently used ones. Stroke color is now independent of fill color for shapes and sections, and connector labels are movable. Additionally, there is an updated color palette with more variety and consistency.

Dev Mode users can now see variables used in gradients. Binding variables to gradients was also added to the plugin API so plugin developers can offer variables support out-of-the-box.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

I loved this example of going deep on a topic using FigJam. Tom Lowry, Figma’s Advocacy Director, shows how he approached researching and building a custom mountain bike by mapping out and thinking through every aspect of the build in FigJam.

Prevent accidental removal of FigJam sections by locking the background of a section.

A new update to Slides lets you bring slides from Figma into a deck with one click.

Brand designer Jamey Gannon made a commercial pitch deck template for early-stage founders raising VC capital. She built dozens of decks in her career for her own rounds or others and used this experience to design this template.

Nick Villapiano, the Director of Front End Development at One North: ​“Dev Mode recognizes that developers don’t just implement design—we’re active participants who need our own set of tools. Carving out a dedicated space within Figma allows developers to contribute meaningfully to the design process from concept to launch. By utilizing recognizable patterns and tried-and-true engineering practices as inspiration, we can do so in ways that feel natural to existing workflows.”

Dev Mode now suggests variables when the value matches a style, color, or size, even if it wasn’t specified in the design. The new color picker also moved in this direction, and now I want this principle to be applied whenever my values overlap with a style or variable. It should be easier both for designers and developers to use the right primitives.

Selecting a variable in Dev Mode now opens a pop-up panel that includes values, properties, aliases, collection information, and more. There is also a new view for all the variable collections used in the file. Watch a demo of all the new features.

Select multiple layers in Figma Slides and apply edits to them all at once.

Mark Foo from Figma shows how Dev Mode addresses common issues in design handoffs by providing a unified workspace where developers can access up-to-date design elements, annotations, and measurements directly within Figma. With features like version comparison, sandbox testing, and integrations like Code Connect and Jira, Dev Mode aims to streamline development workflows, improve efficiency, and foster a cohesive design and development environment.

You can now lock sections in FigJam to prevent them from accidentally being moved.

1) Add new template styles to your decks directly from the styles overview modal. 2) Rename and delete template styles. 3) Draft presenter notes with AI — ​“just add one line of text to your slide and let AI do the heavy lifting.” 4) You can now edit your presenter notes in Presenter View. 5) The Multi-edit is now available in Figma Slides.