Hello everyone,
First of all, thank you for all your effort in creating such a great tool. I believe you are the “Blender” of UI design and you’re doing excellent work.
I recently started using Penpot for a side project with some friends. We initially started with Figma since it’s my main tool and I love it: everything is fluid and fast, everything is placed where I expect to find it. But we soon realized that didn’t make much sense. Personally, I don’t mind paying €15/month for a tool that I believe is really good. However, making my developer colleagues pay just to consume my work seems to indicate Figma’s true interests. Additionally, I’ve found some features in Penpot that have surprised me: the grid layout is excellent and (this might seem trivial) being able to add margins to elements in a container without needing to create another autolayout is very satisfying.
I definitely don’t expect Penpot to be a copy of Figma, but I’ve encountered some things that, perhaps due to my current way of working, cause me frustration. I’ll try to be concise while providing enough information to understand the use case:
Color palette and text styles
Having spent several years working on design systems, my approach to designing interfaces is very system-oriented. I usually use many colors (tokens), including colors with the same HEX but different names because they serve different purposes. The same applies to text styles, with different sizes (body-md, body-sm, etc.) for different devices. This means that when looking for a color or text style, I care more about its name than its value. In this case, the color palette becomes very small (the lateral scroll fills up quickly) and there’s no way to search by name. The color picker shows circles with very similar colors, and I have to hover over them and wait for their names to appear. I recently noticed that all colors appear in the resources tab of the left sidebar, but honestly, I don’t want to use the same menu where layers and pages are located. Idea: A simple dropdown for all colors where typing the name filters the results list.
Component variants and properties
Probably the first thing I missed was certain component creation functionalities. Don’t get me wrong, the current functionality is already sufficient for creating many interfaces, but I feel everything is slower and honestly, it makes me reluctant to create many components. Currently, component creation is very similar to how it was done in Sketch years ago, creating entire matrices of “disconnected” components separated by slashes (/). The main problem with this is that many properties are siblings or independent, and creating a (/) is actually nesting. Building complex components like buttons with variations such as size, type, hierarchy, or style is quite tedious today.
Sharing a design
There’s a small functionality that I took for granted would be similar in Penpot: the share button. I’m so used to sharing links that open a specific frame that when I saw it wasn’t there, I really missed it. It’s very natural to have files with many screens, and without this functionality, anyone accessing the file enters an ocean of screens that’s difficult to navigate.
Other small details
- All pages have the same paper sheet icon. I don’t know if other page types exist, but if not, the icon is redundant. Additionally, many designers end up placing their own emoji to better find pages, creating an icon redundancy (the page icon + the user-chosen one).
- Trackpad zooming on Mac is very slow. I have to zoom at least 3 times to get where I want.
- A keyboard shortcut to open the resource finder. If it exists, I haven’t found it. This shortcut would probably be the one I use most in Figma. If I need anything, I simply use the shortcut and type. I don’t want to search for it in a panel.
- I’ve never worked using rulers. I had to learn the ruler shortcut just to hide them repeatedly every time I reload the page.
- Files can be opened in a new tab, but you can’t return to the Penpot panel in a new tab. It might seem trivial, but consider this use case:
- I access the Penpot panel
- I open a design file
- I realize I need to change something in the component library. I don’t want to leave this file to access the library. My natural instinct was to press Command and click on the Penpot icon to open it in a new tab, but it doesn’t work.
- I know I can open a new tab and type the design.penpo… URL, but it seems like a longer path.
Again, thank you in advance for all your work.
Have a lovely day!