Do you want help us improve Penpot?

How is your experience with Penpot?
What challenges are you trying to solve?
What are your main concerns or questions about Penpot?

This category is the place to have open-ended conversations, and follow along on decisions affecting the project. Tell us your problems and let’s find a solution together!

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I have a suggestion on how to improve this penpot community forum –

there’s too much whitespace! Please compress it a little. Discourse’s typical stock forum is usually very compact, and that’s nice. Finding a good balance between form and function is one of the chief responsibilities of designers, so it’s doubly important that Penpot make good decisions for its community forum. :slight_smile:

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I didnt even consider this but now that you’ve said it I 100% agree! +1

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It keeps crashing every 5 minutes and there are several extremely cumbersome bugs, mostly tied to components. If it weren’t for that, I’d say my experience has been great so far! Just to be clear, I am not complaining, hehe. I’m genuinely impressed with how capable Penpot is, despite the crashing and bugs.

I’m hoping the bugs get some priority, as most of the essential features seem to be already implemented. I’ve seen some friends and colleagues shy away from Penpot because of the bugs/unpolished feel.

I did switch to Penpot to be able to use team/collaborate with my friend specifically, and I wonder if maybe users who do not use team/collaborate experience less crashing and bugs. If that is the case, then I hope teams/collaborate gets more love too. I’m only guessing on this because of three assumptions: a) syncing between clients is prone to more errors, b) I believe most designers work solo, and c) my friend and I have noticed that things glitch more when we are editing together.

My two cents. :slight_smile:

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Hi @DougalMGU. Thanks for your feedback. Now bugs and improvements are in our high priority and the team have been working in finding and fixing them. About component more specifically, the team is doing a rework on it, you can see it here: Where is my component?

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The fontweight (dropdown)menu needs to be a bit intuitive. I find it very difficult to navigate through a long list of numbers (100, 100 italic, 200, 200 italic) to find the correct weight. I’m attaching a simple suggestion. Would be happy to see it live :slight_smile:

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Hello,
often when I work I use two monitors, separating the tools and the work area by distributing them on the two screens.

if it is not already present (apologies in case) is it possible to add a popout option for the workspace or for the side columns? Thank you.

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Hi @marcoriccio :slight_smile:

Split the UI in different windows/pop-outs is not available. You can get more workspace space by hiding the UI or collapsing the left sidebar and using shortcuts for the tools.

We are also planning a Pluging system for the future that probably allow users to create stuff like that.

Hello!

I’ve just started looking at PenPot and I’m quite liking it. There is just a pair of typography related features that I’m finding myself in need of at the moment. I don’t know what the features roadmap might be right now, so maybe these are already part of the plan.

  1. Set Indent for the first line of a paragraph.
  2. Set Paragraph spacing separate from line height.

Anyway. Thanks for the wonderful work that’s been done so far. This is really shaping up!

I like this as well, but it might be handy to see both. It’s nice to know which named weight corresponds to which numbered weight.

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Not sure if this is the right spot, but I have difficulty using software that doesn’t look up to par with my operating system. Is there any initiative to make it more appealing? I really liked Sketch and it’s native look. They didn’t try to be opinionated with design but rather to blend in with the operating system

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I’m not a fan of the UI font Penpot is using, as I found it too wide.

Would it be possible to let us use the default OS font instead?

At the same time, it would then be one less component to load.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Hello @pcote we are working on a new UI for penpot. We hope it will be more enjoyable for you.

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Hey there - I’ve just started testing out penpot and like it a lot. There are a couple improvements that could be made (that also other design tools don’t seem to have yet).

I often work in HSB/HSL - it would be great to default this and also see HSB/HSL values in the side panel instead of hex.

It would also be super nice to be able to select a group of objects and if all the “Hue” value is the same, have a value/slider that will change all selected objects hues together, or all saturations, etc…This is super handy for trying different themes quickly while still in the planning stages.

Thanks very much :slight_smile:

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I found that when I use more flex elements the design stops responding, till I restart my browser. This needs to be improved.

Thanks for the feedback, the team will look into it

The layers panel should be horizontally scrollable, because when I have elements deep nested in the tree it is hard to navigate.

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Hello Friends,
this is my first post here so … Hi all :slight_smile: . Just wanted to mention about export feature. It would be great to could export elements to WEBP format directly from PenPot. This is something I never seen in some other apps (Figma, XD and so on). Of course I know it’s possible using some plugins however it would really help during implementation process when it’s possible out of the box :slight_smile: . I won’t have to use 3rd parties to convert images from JPEG or PNG to WEBP.
Thanks :slight_smile:

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Minor Improvement Request - Re: Adding Layouts to Groups

When I use the + button under the “Layout” section of the design tab for a selected board, that will add a layout to the selected board without changing the name of the board. This is exactly the behavior that I would expect.

I’ve noticed, however, that when I perform this same action with a group rather than a board selected, it will convert the group to a board with a layout (as expected) and in doing so, rename it to “Board”. Similarly to in the previous case, I would expect the group to retain its existing name. This is just a minor inconvenience, but I figure it might also be a relatively quick thing to fix.

Loving the tool so far :slight_smile: keep up the great work guys!

I’m curious if there’s any plans for Penpot to incorporate frontend code components into Penpot (like Web Components, React, Next.js, etc.). I know improving workflow between designers and developers is a top priority for the Penpot team but it seems that the focus is going in one direction: from designer → developer.

What about the other direction? How can designers use an existing component library without the arduous task of completely recreating it in Penpot?