I have conducted two workshop sessions on digital design and best practices, with Penpot proposed as an alternative and introduced to design and technology students. There were around 100 attendees. Mainly students, but also people familiar with UX, UI and programming as well. I’ve also tried to reach a number of events that could cave a space to talk about Penpot, but most of them have not responded in time for this report, and the ones who replied were with a no.
This post is more of a summary of what I have been seeing or hearing these past months based on these events and efforts, but also conversations I’ve been having with other professionals.
Things I’ve learned so far
There is great potential for Penpot here in Brazil, but it also comes with great needs for advertising for individuals & companies and educational resources. Let’s dive right in.
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Penpot is still relatively unknown in my region, so people and companies are still not aware of it as an suitable alternative to major players like Figma. However, when introduced, especially with the greater value and meaning behind, there was great excitement from most people.
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There is an understanding of “I will use what works easily for me or what the company decides for me” in most design communities. So in a sense, should a tool present itself as an alternative to most pain points other people have with the mainstream tools (take Affinity x Adobe subscription take as example), this opens a whole new path to engage with people looking for a real change, which may lead to organic advertisement and newer workflows not just for individuals but also businesses, as well.
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The concept of open-source and how it works, as well as the meaning behind was and still is a bit unknown for most people, but the audience in both workshop sessions was interested in learning more about it once the concept was presented.
Areas to improve
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They do value the fact that Penpot has a lot of content in Portuguese (mostly made by me, for now), courses and even an international certification, but most of them pointed out that they have never heard anything related to Penpot before that moment.
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We can start looking to engage with design and technology related events around the region, this will bring very qualified people to know and even check Penpot out. If the company itself is the one reaching out to events to present Penpot or sponsor the event or even send someone (in this case can be ambassadors or even people from the development team) it has a lot more weight in Brazil than an individual doing the same work, even if this person is an official ambassador.
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Brazil also has a culture of learning and consuming new products after they are shown in the mainstream media somehow, like social media videos and podcasts with specialists talking about it. Working together with podcasts to engage in interviews or with content creators to sponsor certain campaigns can have good impact as opposed to other ways of promoting an event/a content piece or something else.
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In Brazil, the best way to make a product pop is to make it engage with the local cultural needs. Understand the pain points from the people and bring to the table how the product solve such problems is how to make it appealing to people. In the case of Penpot, it already follow an old brazilian recipe that we love in most products we consume: “Bom, Bonito e Barato”, which translates to: Efficient, Good-Looking and Cheap/Financially Acessible. This should be a strong point in the sales speech of Penpot, bringing the open-source philosophy as an extra for people that want to engage even further.
Notes for future viewers
Brazil is a unique country in terms of how people consume content and engage with products and brands. Especially when it comes to products and technology, localized content as well as seeing direct contact from the company itself carries a lot of weight in comparison with other types of engagement. This do not invalidade the organic or even sponsored ways to advertise to people, they still work, just differently.
Photos and Videos
As the workshops were private, I have no images from it, so I will share a picture taken from the last community hours we had, which was a lot of fun 
