Death by Powerpoint? Perhaps ‘Death of Powerpoint’ is more apt. Because Figma just launched a slide design tool, and it’s pretty, pretttttty, prettttty good.

About 18 months ago I was ready to ditch Google Slides. It was driving my nuts. Let’s not even get started on Powerpoint.

As me and the Wavetable team had been using Figma for designing various digital products and learning materials, we thought we’d give it a whirl for slides.

In just a couple of weeks, we’d built all the content for a multi-module online course.

Soon, Figma was the home for keynotes, workshops, sales decks, worksheets, and more.

However, there were a few thorny issues:

• It’s tricky to use if you’re not a decent designer (I’m passable at best)
• Exporting slides was clunky
• Most obviously - it’s not a slide tool! No presenter notes, transitions, or other presentation essentials

Basically, we were following our instincts. Hacking it.

Then, last week our lead designer sent me a note: “Howard, have you seen this?”

A new tool, called Figma Slides.

We’ve gone in deep, and I gotta say, it’s very cool.

There are brand kits, real-time collaboration, interactions. All your design assets linked together.

And we can work FAST.

I just spun out three pitch deck variations in under an hour. Overnight an upcoming workshop went from a fiddly Google Slides draft to a super-sleek Figma build.

Along with Notion for documents and project planning, and Whimsical for visualizations, Figma just became the third pillar of our team’s foundational toolkit. Sorry, Google.

P.S. I don’t mind admitting we love nerding out on this stuff. Perhaps Fer Franco said it best: “Such a good feeling when a product gets an update like this!”. I agree.