Miscellaneous suggestions

Help us improve Penpot
1

Hey folks! Like many new members, I’m left disillusioned by the recent news that Adobe is trying to cannibalize the market yet again by buying out Figma. Penpot has a lot of potential as an alternative, plus it’s always good to support FOSS projects! :blush: However, it’s lacking a few features that I really got accustomed to in my workflow and that I genuinely can’t give up on. I should probably mention that while I do use Figma for its intended purpose of UI/UX design and prototyping, I’ve found it to be a great tool for vector illustration and icon design - one that’s lightweight and that I find very pleasant to use.

Most of my suggestions will align with that particular usage I’d make of Penpot, so I don’t really have any particular expectations, I’m sure there are many more pressing additions to make that would actually benefit UI/UX designers more, and that’s totally OK! But still, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share them! :slight_smile:

With that said, here are some features I’d really like to see make their way to the app:

  • Applying rounded corners to any shape, including boolean groups and individual nodes. I use that a lot to create smooth, complex shapes with minimal hassle!
  • Creating arcs out of circles.
  • Mask shapes taking effects (blur, shadows) into account. Again, only really useful for illustration, as it lets me do complex shading…
  • And while we’re at it, maybe adding a handy little shortcut icon for masking right next to the boolean/flatten ones?
  • When editing a node, having the ability for both handles to always have the same length for more uniform shape tweaking.
  • Being able to click & drag on a value box to change said value.
  • Allowing an image box to have different fit modes, like cover, contain, or tiling to allow the use of patterns.

That’s all I can really think of currently, if I have any more suggestions I’ll add them in further posts. Oh, and if one of my suggestions turns out to already be a thing that I was too dumb to notice, please let me know as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for your time, keep up the good work and good luck! <3

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I better hope they add these features to PenPot as soon as they can before Figma inevitably becomes a bug infested mess, horribly overpriced, or both
Am looking forward to the release of Auto layout in PenPot within a month

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@Voxy: Thanks for your suggestions – a very thoughtful post with good ideas! I do not use Penpot for illustrations, but

and

would be also useful for non-illustration users like me!

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Hi @Voxy i will try to address some of this suggestion. About paths in general, we have a list of improvements. We are planning to have some time focused on implementing most of them. You can take a look at them by filtering the backlog using the word “path”: Taiga. For example:

  1. Rounded corners
  2. Add tools for arcs

Draggable inputs are also something that the team have talked before, and it has recently been added to our backlog.

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