MATTE Projects’ Post

I never Linked-In but the announcement of #FigmaSlides at #ConFig2024 is a milestone for digital creatives, non-digital non-creatives in agency-adjacent spaces deck design culture [?] here's a roundabout why ✶ ☞ The starting point—it's 2024; PDFs are not a dynamic enough deck-medium to send out at the top of your game. ► In-room Keynote videos pop off, but following up w/ the file? Do you send the .Key for them to >slides >play to mirror that in-room experience? ✕ There's often awkward just-out-of-frame [INT] annotations ‘under the hood’. This leads to an unremitting [EXT] copy file circuit that lacks composure. ☏ Recently Matthew Rowean dropped some bars, noting yes, we need highest-standard excellence / dynamism but 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑒; it must accommodate a likely user scenario—opened up in the back of a car en route to the airport. ✰ The agency world = InDesignDeck-maximalism, but mobile UX leaves much to be desired—full, sound-on videos only expand in clunky fullscreen, autoplay is only possible compressed into gifs, forfeiting music. ✐ The taboo question; what about 𝐶𝑎𝑛𝑣𝑎? ➢ Canva is undoubtedly changing the game re: AI/design-deck-accessibility (auto-remove bg there vs PS and never go back). High-glossness is no longer gatekept by trained designers and I think that's a good thing. ➢ However, Canva hasn’t rolled out a whitelabeled enterprise product yet. Sharing Canva is sharing the egregious kiddish-C logo. It's a tough sell, acknowledging that your topline creative was made on the same platform your cousin, who can barely use facebook, designed the entire brand ID for their homemade jam company on. To avoid, go back, export PDF, lose all dynamism. ☞ Back to Figma. It’s an open secret that despite being a UX/UI-product, outputting decks from Figma yields the most baller and coveted final product. ➀ Future-facing design; high-fidelity, videos autoplaying, w/ sound ➁ Follow-up format; preferred, unintrusive; sleek mobile ➂ Platform literacy; needs work ➢ The optionality of Figma—operating w/ more of a script-logic—makes it the right-hand for interface design. However, this intimidates creatives outside that field (their right hand Adobe). Even so, just opening the file outside the player can send non-digital, non-creatives into fight-or-flight mode—so what's the point? ➫ Previously, building decks in Figma required rich-prototyping and specific practiced knowledge that eliminated it from being the obvious default in multidisciplinary/creative agency/spaces. FigmaSlides is touted to “pair the power & precision of Figma Design with easy-to-use presentation tools.” If FigmaSlides is made manifest like I'm hoping it is, it might really change the [my] world. ☞ Not Figma advertising, just a canon moment from someone that’s been collaborating across different file types, at different life stages, across specialists and non-specialists, creatives and admins—pushing for the highest-quality product every time ■