Interactions in large penpot projects

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Hello, I am encountering some friction when modeling interactions in my Penpot projects. I am posting these points of friction here to see if people have experienced these too, and if people have workarounds, have different ways of interacting with the software that I can adopt to improve my usage of the application.

  1. When designing interactions, I have trouble to use the drag-and-drop method of pointing an interaction at another board, as dropping the interaction on an object that is not the board base, points it to that object in isolation instead of the full board. When the board is full of subitems (large flex layouts for example), no background is exposed at all, which makes creating this link impossible.
  2. Which leads me to the second point: When drag-and-drop is not possible, you can still use the sidebar, but it has a few issues too:
    1. When the name of the board you are trying to link is long, they become hard, if not impossible to distinguish. The sidebar cannot be resized, making this problem harder to work around.
    2. Not only boards, but all items are present in the dropdown. Leading to hundreds of “Group”, “text input” and other component names leading you to scroll for a long time to find the board you are targeting. There is no search here to help you find things faster either.

If people have tips to improve my workflow they would be appreciated!

Screenshot From 2026-04-01 15-26-38
Screenshot From 2026-04-01 15-26-38276Ă—471 13.3 KB

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2

I experience the same friction points when creating prototypes.

The only workaround I’ve found is to add a chunk of empty space in the main board for each screen. That way, you have a target to drag for the drag-and-drop method.

For example, I select my main boards and add 200 px of spacing between the flex elements. Then, after I’ve created the interactions, I remove the padding again. This isn’t an elegant solution (and quite slow on complex boards), but sometimes faster than trying to find the right target in the list. Especially if I haven’t put in the work to name all my boards strategically.

I wish only top-level boards would be viable as targets. That’d speed prototyping up a lot.

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3

Hello, I have the same problem. In the past, I could drop it onto the board because it wouldn’t connect to a component.

For now, I use an auto layout on the main artboard with another artboard inside it. Instead of using padding, I apply a margin to the inner artboard. This way, you can drop elements through the margin.

Unlike padding, you can still select through the margin. This works well for my designs because I always have an offset on at least one edge. You can also add a number before your artboard name so it appears at the top of the list in the dropdown.

Hopefully this helps!

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