Exciting news for the Penpot community: Penpot 2.0 is just around the corner, and we share your excitement and enthusiasm! For those who can’t wait to dive into the latest updates and features, there’s great news – you don’t have to wait any longer!
We are thrilled to introduce early.penpot.dev, a special preview for our eager community members to explore the innovations and improvements of Penpot 2.0 firsthand. This is your chance to get a sneak peek at what all the hype is about and experience the advancements we’ve been working on.
We’re not just excited to show you what’s new; we’re eager to hear from you! To make the most out of this opportunity, here are a few things you can do:
1. Explore the new features: Take a deep dive into the enhanced capabilities and improved user interface. We would love to hear your thoughts on it. 2. Create and share: Use the new tools to create something unique, and then share it here in this post. 3. Share kudos: The team have been working hard on this version. Notice anything cool? Let us know!
Don’t miss this chance to be among the first to explore the future of Penpot. Visit early.penpot.dev today, and let’s shape the future of design together.
(this is a test environment, do not use for real work, the projects will be periodically wiped.)
The UI looks a lot cleaner! I dig the new placement of the toolbar and the news layers icons (it’s great to have the collapse arrow on the left of the layers as well). It’s a lot more consistent with the industry standard.
Updates to the component are great, my only complaint is about the component’s selection border design:
It looks grey when not selected
It has a low contrast when selected
This makes it hard to check if a board is a component without looking at the layer panel. Other software make it more obvious.
I’m not so sure about the «collapse menu» buttons on the sidebar and toolbar; it looks especially confusing on the layer sidebar (I was not sure if there were other tabs besides «Layers» and «Assets») but there might be a use case I’m missing.
So happy to see that we’re closing in on the release of 2.0! One thing, though. I REALLY don’t like that master components remain on the board. That’s going to result in so much visual clutter which will make for a heavier cognitive load while building out a significant project. I much prefer XD’s method of maintaining the master component in the assets panel, even after being deleted from the board.
I also thought so at the beginning but I actually like the idea of creating a dedicated page where I have all my master components. This way you can always go and edit them and it gives them a physical existence.
In XD, you can go to the component in the asset panel and right-click on it to “Edit Main component” and then it’s placed on the board for editing. This way it’s never in the way if you don’t need it.
Loving the update overall. Thanks for all your work on this.
A few small design niggles:
The typography and colour palette sometimes has a gap when it’s collapsed. Also the intersection with the rounded corner of the window looks a little janky. Maybe move it up 2px or something?
I miss the two arrow icons here I dunno, I just liked that visual indication of what each dropdown does, even though I know very well what each does. I don’t have to think about which is the right one when the icon is there.
It’s not intuitive to me that this icon collapses the sidebar. Before clicking on it I assumed it would navigate me back to my files.
This is nitpicking in the extreme but it bugs me that the distance between checkbox and text is not consistent with similar components elsewhere in the UI, like in ‘Selected colours’.
Can you please make this entire area clickable to expand/collapse sections, instead of just the icons being clickable? The icon is a tiny area to hit. Or at least the arrow icon and text (as the plus icon can also be used to add multiple items).
For now no concrete or detailed feedback. I am playing around and I just want to send a big big congrats to the entire team. First impression, the UI looks gorgeous. I have tried quickly the flexbox layout, grid layout, creating a colour palette, a typography scale. And all went without needing to consult any instructions. Kudos for all these. I made a simple button component, and that worked as expected too.
Now I want to explore components way further, as well as interactions. Since this is new, I am assuming there is no docs for it yet?
Hello, I’m sharing Kudos to your team. I am happy to see Penpot updates because it brings me closer to migrating to your software from Figma completely(at least for freelance/personal work) at some point.
What I love: The UI is looking better with each update, I love the new fill window UI I love how snapping to rulers works now, it’s consistent with my expectations. The current Penpot version wouldn’t always snap Boards to rulers and the snapping would behave differently depending on how zoomed in/out you were in the canvas.
What can be better: I like the size and look of the new “constraints” widget, but like the user experience of the old one more (perpendicular lines in relation to the widget borders makes more sense to me like in original)
What I’m missing: option for numbered or bulleted list in text options preview of fonts while we hover on names (you select text and hover over fonts and they change the look of the text in accordance to the font that I’m hovering over) font names in the font style would be nice, but not necessary THIS! Saving our favorite fonts in like a font group, not just recent fonts or even fonts “in this file” like Figma does it, Figma also misses that option for custom font groups! This would make selecting fonts so much faster!
Thank you for all your work Penpot team! I look forward to using the new version of the software!
Thanks, ofc I watched that. I have more questions though. Coming from figma … I am used to handle component states using variants, and I am used to creating intearctive components by creating interactions in component master between these variants. So I wonder how to handle such tasks with penpot.
Thank you for adding a light mode! I have astigmatism and the halation on the v1 dark UI is tough some days.
Overall seems like many nice refinements.
Requests:
It’d be great to update the board size presents. The iPhone 5 hasn’t been sold by Apple in over a decade and the iPhone 12 Pro’s resolution is much higher than the preset says.
I’d like to be able to copy a layer’s styles and paste them to another layer. Even better: set the style as a design token I can apply.
I’d like to be able to zoom to 200% easily. The jump from 100, 130, 169, 220 remains unusual to me.
Penpot is probably one of the tools I am most excited about seeing develop. I think designers need a tool that they can really dedicate to learning without having to worry about deprecation or feature reduction like Figma’s latest removal of Inspect. Playing with 2.0, I just wanted to add my two cents of features I was hoping to see, but also little things that aren’t really working for me:
I find the drag-bar ui to be a bit confusing and maybe the wrong pattern for these components. I keep trying drag the item, but then I realized it is just to collapse both. I’m not sure if I find it that valuable, unless there is a secondary reason, maybe on tablet? But would definitely prefer an arrow indicator.
Draggable inputs
This has become somewhat of standard in tools I am using these days, being able to drag on the left part of the input to fine tune the property.
Layout + Button and below missing right padding
Feel like there can be a more subtle unobtrusive way to let the use know of the save status. Particularly the Red X status I find to be quite jarring.
In dark mode, why not have the canvas also be a dark color. Currently it is still with a white background on a new project. I always have to change it when I start a new project.
Lastly, I was really hoping to see a plugin API be released. Not sure if that will be included in this release, but I think Penpot has so much more potential than Figma in terms of design automation and design tokens.
Hello everybody. Here is my first feedback, and it layout related. I am unsure what causes the issue, I am thinking it might be a css grid related issue. But might be flex as well.
Here is a video (with voice) explaining what the issue is.
I might be biased as I use XD for work but I agree with this.
You can of course have things visible on a sheet if you want in XD. But you don’t have to. IMO a good heuristic in design is “let the user control their own experience”. Seeing as the XD pattern allows for people to use the Sketch pattern, if they so choose, but the Sketch pattern does not do the same for XD pattern use, I think the XD pattern is superior.
I’m no longer waiting to share this link, the domain, and big news. Thank you!
I dunno, I just liked that visual indication of what each dropdown does, even though I know very well what each does. I don’t have to think about which is the right one when the icon is there.
The UI is looking better with each update, I love the new fill window UI
I like the size and look of the new “constraints” widget, but like the user experience of the old one more (perpendicular lines in relation to the widget borders makes more sense to me like in original)
option for numbered or bulleted list in text options
