Penpod France insights
In september, I gave a 90 min workshop about Penpot (in French) at Paris Web event, to nearly 25 participants. The aim was to get familiar with Penpot, its various features, and talk about Opensource design and the different ways to contribute to an opensource project as a designer.
Things we learned
- Over half of the participants weren’t designers, but were very interested in trying Penpot and helping out with feedback and contribution. For instance, some users were Accessibility and UX experts.
- Many users are actively looking for a Figma alternative and for a more open ecosystem.
- Many participants didn’t know it was possible to contribute. When asked about contributing to open source, participants thought first of code and translation. Which means that one of the barriers to design contribution is not about skills, but about knowing it exists.
- Users were pleasantly surprised to discover Penpot, its opensource philosophy, and the fact it was based on open standards.
- Open source design contribution goes beyond building components and templates. Participants gave us very useful feedback on user experience and accessibility, which is exactly the kind of input that helps improve the tool itself.
Areas to improve
- There were all kind of levels in the audience, from expert designers to developers who’d never tried a design software before. People went beyond the planned exercises. It’s important to have at least 3 levels of difficulty that participants can choose from, or lower the participants-to-animator ratio.
- The hand-on session took more time than planned, because many users had questions and wanted to learn more about Penpot. As a result, we didn’t talk much about the ways to contribute to opensource projects as a designer, thus the resources listed below.
- We had a shared team with all the participants, but didn’t collaborate on a same file, because the goal was for everyone to build their own components and library. It would be nice to save some time to work all together on a same file next time.
Notes for future viewers
Below are some links/resources dealing with OpenSource design:
- The Opensource Design community website
- Design We Open workshop materials
A complete set of workshop resources, templates, exercises, and facilitation guides for helping designers learn how to contribute to open-source projects. By @Erioldoesdesign - SustainOSS Design podcast
A podcast featuring conversations with designers, researchers, and open-source contributors about design, sustainability, and building healthy OSS communities.
Photos, videos, links
- Photos of the workshop are coming soon!
- Some examples of components created by the participants:
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You can view the presentation slides in French.
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A Penpot file was shared to all participants to start working and playing with Penpot, that you can download and try yourself (in French):
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Check out the Penpot library of templates. Most of its content comes from user contributions, feel free to share your templates and files that can help the community!
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Here’s some feedbacks left by participants (translated from French):
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Thanks for the workshop, I’d never taken the time to try Penpot. It is very promising with many features similar to Figma, and everything opensource, that is impressing […].
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A huge downside of Figma is that it’s not possible to export PDF that are accessible (PDF UA1) and readable by screen readers. It should be easy in Penpot to use the json from the Penpot file to export it as an accessible PDF.
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