Design first, hand-off later. Same same, but different? How Penpot should change the industry

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1

Connecting front-end devs and product designers is the biggest unsolved issue we face in nowadays workflows. If you work in the professional field, especially in cooperations with multiple product teams, you might know the never-ending journey between design and engineering teams. Including, writing tickets, alignments, QA, and a lot of frustration.

We spend hours designing pixel-perfect digital products to get at the end not-so-pixel-perfect results. Yes, we have inspect mode and measurement tools. But let’s face it, it improves the situation, but in my humble opinion, the general workflow is broken, outdated, and still creates team silos.

How can Penpot revolutionize the industry? Bring devs and designers finally together. Create a UI-library platform like “Storybook” and synchronize it to Penpot.

  1. Let devs build the component structure in HTML.
  2. Synchronize the HTML structure and represent it as layers in Penpot.
  3. Designers work with the given structure and design the components. Penpot synchronizes the changes with the UI library.
  4. Let’s do it together, really agile in parallel processes. No hand-off, less tickets, less frustrating communication, better quality

UI Design and Front-End Development must be understood as one process, not two separate ones. We need a tool that connects both worlds. Inspect mode is not enough and will never be.

Maybe AI will make my idea become obsolete. But at the moment we work in modern design tools and use latest frameworks, but with an outdated workflow.

Thanks for sharing your opinion on that topic.

1 Like
2

Couldn’t agree more. Penpot should use its youth to focus on a code first approach to design, and not follow the same path as Figma. On my latest team, we actually focused more on the final result, and less on polishing designs. We would iterate in both, but good looking designs just didn’t matter that much, we wanted to be able to influence the final result more directly, and focus less on handoff processes. It is a huge pain point and time waster, that I hope Penpot can look into solving.