Hi,
I am a Designer have been checking out Penpot on off for a while. Something very important in my workflow is the use of Variants. It simply is one of the most important features in a design tool. The current way to create variants in penpot doesn’t seem intutive. It’s quite confusing and it doesn’t feel like variants but seperate components just under the same component name. I think right now this is one of the main things stopping me from moving over completelty from figma.
I saw some threads on variants but they were from mid 2023 and before. Will there be a change on this structure on how component variants are created?
We are working on it. The definition is already in place, and we expect to start implementing it soon. You can find more information in this public epic:
I’m just wondering: when you say variants, are you referring to Penpot’s component functionality, or more specifically, it component instance functionality where a Penpot component is comprised of 2 parts: the main component and that component’s instance/s?
@josel In figma the instance is just a linked copy of the component. If the component changes, the instance will change (unless overridden). Yes this is possible in penpot too.
But more specifically we would need to be able to set properties to these components. A different combination of properties can be called a variant. eg. icon-right (true/false), button-type(outline, text, filled), size(small, big) etc.
Since developers also work with a similar workflow in developing components, usually if the design team and dev team are in sync, the workflow is much smoother. This seems to be missing in penpot.
@carolina.portugal I checked out the Variants epic in Taiga and it looks like it may have been de-prioritized with still quite a bit of work ahead before initial release. If we import Figma components (and their associated variants) into Penpot, we can currently mimic variations by creating multiple components, which is a bit of a functional bandaid solution. That leads me to this question: Is or will there be anything on the product roadmap to retroactively consolidate all of these multiple component versions into variations once variations are introduced into Penpot such that they are comparable to Figma variations? Keep up the great work!
That’s awesome news! I was looking at your epics and just noticed that Variants looked to be very early compared to the rest of the feature set. Do you think there’ll be some type of backwards compatibility/conversion in changing multiple components to a single component with multiple variants?
Nevermind …just noticed it is Main for the main component and Copy for the instances. I guess I will just wait patiently until those things get merged (or when there is a way to test them in develop.
