Save Time on Building Decks—Without Sacrificing Design | Figma Blog

4 min read Original article ↗

Whether you’re pitching a potential client, running an all-hands meeting, or demoing a new product, a great presentation means telling a great story. That’s why we launched Slides in beta last year—as a tool that brings all the design power of Figma into a friendly interface the whole team can use. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that you can now extend those capabilities with plugins, just as you’ve been doing in Figma and FigJam.

Some of your favorite plugins—and some exciting new ones—are already compatible with Slides. From eye-catching images, to color gradient controls, to animation, these plugins make it easier to tailor your designs and build a compelling narrative. To get you started, we’ve rounded up some stand-out plugins to try at every stage of slide creation.

Populating your slides

Pull ready-to-use graphics with IconScout

When you’re deep in the flow of building your deck, the last thing you want to do is hunt for graphics to bring your ideas to life. Luckily, IconScout puts millions of high-quality icons, illustrations, Lottie animations, and Unicons at your fingertips. Tweak your designs with a custom color palette, or find similar assets with reverse image search.

An illustration of a person searching for icons through a telescopeAn illustration of a person searching for icons through a telescope

Try IconScout to access a library of illustrations, icons, and Lottie animations.

Ditch boring backgrounds with Mesh Gradient

Create custom backdrops and color fills that feel tailored to your brand with Mesh Gradient, which allows you to edit the vertices and edges of an underlying grid. Get live previews of each gradient, and save and upload them for further editing.

A cover image shows a pink, purple, and orange mesh gradientA cover image shows a pink, purple, and orange mesh gradient

Turn PDFs into assets with PDF.to.design

If you find yourself wrestling with a PDF, look no further than this plugin, which imports the file as designs with editable layers so you can extract the text and images you need. Plus, files are kept private on your local machine, so you don’t have to worry about revealingsensitive information.

A cover image shows a PDF from a book being imported into FigmaA cover image shows a PDF from a book being imported into Figma

Adding power and polish

Animate your designs with Jitter

It’s a well known fact that motion draws the eye. Import individual slides or your entire deck into Jitter to easily animate text and images, and choose from a variety of effect parameters for fine-grained control over how individual elements behave.

Two screenshots show a purple Jitter screen on top of a Figma canvas.Two screenshots show a purple Jitter screen on top of a Figma canvas.

Connect to your audience with UI Faces

Whether you’re presenting user research or sharing a design mockup, avatars humanize your work and help you and your teams relate to your audience. Choose from a library of AI-generated faces ranging from photorealistic, to cartoonish, to abstract, to hand-drawn—to the downright outlandish with UI Faces’ alien set.

A grid of faces overlaid with "1000+ free avatars"A grid of faces overlaid with "1000+ free avatars"

Match your slides to music with BeatSync Video Maker

There’s nothing quite like a video set to a catchy beat to keep your audience engaged. With BeatSync Video Maker, you can upload a track—or choose a provided tune—and select slides to match up to the automatically parsed beats. Export the video for a hype reel that’s ready to share, or upload it to another presentation as a compelling closer.

A screenshot shows slides being stitched together in a videoA screenshot shows slides being stitched together in a video

Preparing to present

Tidy up your design with Clean Deck

Things can get messy when you’re building a deck, and that’s a good thing—moving sections around in grid view, cutting unnecessary slides, and throwing assets onto the canvas for easy reference are all part of telling a compelling story. When you’re ready to present or publish a new template, however, it’s time to clear the clutter. Clean Deck scrubs skipped slides and off-slide layers so you don’t have to do the dirty work yourself.

Before and after screenshots shows hidden slides disappearing from grid viewBefore and after screenshots shows hidden slides disappearing from grid view

Get your timing down with Rehearse

It’s always a good idea to do a couple dry runs before giving a big presentation. Whether you’re running the show or sharing the spotlight with other presenters, Rehearse keeps track of how long you spend on each slide as well as total elapsed time. With practice, you’ll hit your beats and stay on pace.

A screenshot shows timestamps on past slidesA screenshot shows timestamps on past slides

As always, everything we build is in partnership with the community. We’re thankful to everyone who’s published a plugin and welcome you to build your own. To see what’s available for Slides, check out the Figma Community—new plugins are being added every day.