Hi Penpot team, I’m really glad this platform exists for us the upcoming UI/UX?graphic designers. We truly appreciate all your efforts and dedication in creating PenPot (cheers). I currently use Adobe XD and sometimes Sketch to design UIs and prototypes, but their pricing model is becoming increasingly expensive for me as I barely make any money within a month to continue using them. So discovering Penpot has given me a sense of hope for the future.
I like everything so far, in terms of the tools and functionality. Although there is more that needs to be done to be on par with Figma or Adobe XD. I currently have most of my files/works in XD and Sketch formats. It will be great if there’s an option to import them into Penpot whilst keeping all or most of the layers editable. This will make it easier to transition from what we are already used to into Penpot without starting from scratch.
Personally, this is one of my biggest issues keeping me from completely jumping into Pepot right now. If or when this feature becomes available, believe me when I say you’ll have an influx of designers switching to Penpot. I hope your team will look into this and consider it in your future upgrade/update.
Hi @KwesiArter ! First of all, thanks for your kind words and your support for Penpot!
Your request for an import tool to bring Adobe XD/Figma/Sketch is a well known one. Actually, you can see them as user stories in our Taiga project
We know that investing so much time in another tool prevents people from migrating unless they have a very powerful reason (pricing is one, but it’s not the ideal one for us, TBH). We do allow for SVG imports so there’s a way already although we need to improve text managing.
Long story short, this is important to us but it’s tricky to give it top priority when we need important features in Penpot. So I think the order would be:
Exit BETA thanks to a great onboarding experience
Add Layout and Enhanced components features
Work on migration tools
This way, people migrating will enjoy an even better Penpot experience. That “influx of designers” won’t have many complaints. And we will keep adding features to make sure developers and designer can work together on Penpot.
On a side note, for what is worth, I can share our past experience with our other open source product, the agile project management tool Taiga. We did create those importer tools (Trello, Jira, Asana, Github) and we discovered that not that many people used them. It looked as if people were OK starting anew with Taiga whenever a new project provided them the excuse while leaving the old projects archived at their original locations. Now, projects and designs are not the same but it’s important for us that we are careful with when we address this.
Also, do you keep close contact with the design community in Ghana?
This makes sense to me. Usually, imports from one tool to another are flawed. Not because the import code is bad, but because different tools have different capabilities. In most cases (e.g. vector graphics, DTP) I either recreated the original data in the new tool (+improvements, while I am at it) or I did an “import light” where I imported the most portable and standardized parts only and added the rest manually (e.g. ex/import the text as .docx but recreate the layout). Fitting candidates for an “import light” in UI-Design applications might be assets like images, text styles and color pallets.
@jdittrich@diacritica
I get it now. However, I do know most import tools in other platforms don’t do a perfect job and I’m okay with that. As for me, if the tool is able to import about 90% or more of the work and make it easy to adjust/edit the ones it couldn’t get right, it’s good enough for me.
With that said, I also understand certain priorities needs to be taken care of first or in the order of importance.
I believe everyone here wants the best for Penpot, so hopefully everything works out great in the end for us all.
let me start by saying I love what you and your team are doing here, it truly is remarkable. One thing you said above struck me. I really liked how you spelled out the order you see things going in general terms. That transparency is AWESOME! Im wondering if there might be a way to expand on that such as almost a live page that shows what you and team are prioritizing, and to be able to see updates when you might change course and prioritize something else due to some reason or another. Not necc spell out the reasoning in complete detail, but maybe just a napkin sketch that the community might be able to see? I could see this as being not the approach when creating functionality that Figma doesn’t have (what a beautiful world it will be! ), but when getting up to speed on some functionality that is clear as day that you and team are working on, I wonder if that would help and could maybe guide that prioritization with logic and open discussion. Anyways, keep up the great work!
Thanks @deee !! Right now, the closest to that live page would be our Taiga backlog . It gives you an idea of the current sprint, what’s coming next and what’s been prioritized. On top of that I’d like to host monthly streams to discuss that and invite both team members and community members to focus on one or two topics tops. After our official launch in a few weeks we’ll redefine our next big iteration (6 months or so) and we’ll come up with some new ideas about this “sharing our strategy and current focus + change of course when it happens”
@KwesiArter, it would seem that if you can get your sketch or xd files into figma, then you can start using the figma plugin they are working on. I have not tried it, but probably lower your expectation
I would also suggest to start using penpot if it works for you with new project or new clients.
The awesome folks at Penpot are moving actually very quickly with such a small team, but it will be awhile for them to get up to speed with many thing as they build out the foundation of the program.
I just tried to open AdobeXD, selected one of my designed Tables copied SVG code and pasted it into PenPotand for a second, I noticed that all layers copied too. Yet after couple of seconds PenPot went to “internal error”.
Maybe You could give it a try if you installed it with Docker on local machine? Maybe it will work?
**- Just tried again with the object which have small number of layers. It copied, even name of the folders. Yet nothing is editable.
Copying between applications is difficult. This easily works as an image (resouce-in-a-rectangle) but it is difficult to transfer components (like a table or a button) since they have specific properties attached to them that do not have an exchange standard (SVG is not the solution, since the SVG standard does only a part of the features needed for that)
I was able to pull this off with adobe xd to penpot.
This conversion is probably the highest quality vs using svg import and exports.
By doing the following:
), but when getting up to speed on some functionality that is clear as day that you and team are working on, I wonder if that would help and could maybe guide that prioritization with logic and open discussion. Anyways, keep up the great work!