Today we kicked off our inaugural Penpot Fest, an event that brings together developers and designers to discuss the future of product development.
We decided to host Penpot Fest because we needed a space where both designers and developers could work together on the shared struggles that keep them from getting to a completely new level in software development.
Penpot turned out to be a perfect host since our own product was conceived and built both by designers and developers. That’s our secret sauce!
In fact, when we surveyed 30,000 Penpot users last year we found the split between designers and developers was nearly identical: 35 percent identified as designers and 34 percent as developers!
So, yeah, we couldn’t think of a better time to share some exciting news for Penpot than… Penpot Fest!
Penpot Fest Welcome party!
Ready for some cool news?
We have been extremely busy since we exited beta back in February, perhaps as busy as you folks onboarding Penpot whether on SaaS, Desktop or self-hosted instances.
And we’re excited to finally share with you some major updates on what we’ve been working on.
On top of our recent “400K strong” blog post, today we’re making two very important announcements. One is related to Penpot as a product and the other one is related to Penpot as a project!
Grid Layout is coming!
Since 2017, developers have been enjoying the power of CSS Grid layout. If CSS Flex brought them one wrappable dimension, Grid came with a revamped 2-dimensional layout. The combined Flex and Grid CSS capabilities have been native to frontend developers for some years now. Unfortunately, designers had to deal with old-school proprietary layout systems that would only exacerbate the design-to-code lost-in-translation drama that plagues software building these days.
The Penpot team unveiled today our upcoming Grid Layout feature, which is already accessible through our git repo and the open beta found at https://grid-layout.penpot.dev/ (not at all production ready!). We will soon be reaching out to you, our amazing community, for the early access feedback stage. We can’t wait to see what you think could make Grid Layout even more exciting!
Grids everywhere!
For many actors in the industry as well as many designers and developers, this was an unexpected move by Penpot.
Penpot’s Grid Layout World Premiere! Clara and Alonso SHOW and not tell!
However, it just felt a natural next step for us! Now designers and developers will share a common language, one based on open standards delivered by an open source design & prototyping tool.
Tokens Studio partnership!
We asked ourselves, what if we dreamed really big about the future of design systems and the huge role they’re destined to play in unlocking AI? We’re thrilled to announce we’re partnering with the world class Tokens Studio team to bring a truly scalable design tokens architecture to Penpot.
The future!
Not only will Tokens Studio bring design tokens to Penpot in a native integration (more on that coming soon!), but we are also working together on an AI engine that will unlock AI for design systems in powerful new ways.
live from stage! Marco, Pablo and Jan!
I wanted to share some words from Tokens Studio co-creator Jan Six that share our excitement about this partnership:
“Tokens Studio and Penpot are open source at its core. We’re both committed to ensuring users are completely in control, so we’re thrilled to partner and bring true design tokens with bidirectional sync from your storage providers to Penpot in a native integration. And that’s just the start - we’re also working towards a design knowledge graph that is based on your product, brand, and team, and bringing constraint based design with this design knowledge graph to users by leveraging AI.”
Other announcements!
But there’s more! During Penpot Fest we’ll also be unveiling Components v2, the new revamped UI, the upcoming Desktop offline mode and 5 open AI challenges for the Community! Stay tuned!
I’ll say this again! We’re so grateful to our community of incredible designers, developers and open source advocates!
