Thanks!
I’m not sure how exporting it as a single JSON file would work, or if there’s a tool or method to merge them. (I’m not familiar with Figma, this tool the PatternFly folks built, or tokens.)
I tried merging them, but Penpot complained about the file. It seems to import the colors, but nothing else. I probably did something wrong. 
Ok, I manage to create a single set of tokens. The problem was that, in figma, they are using variables, not tokens. So I was able to transform them to Tokens format with Tokens Studio plugin, and I got a (really) big file with a lot of tokens. I can’t guarantee they are ok because the transformation from variables to tokens is not 1:1 but maybe it is useful to play around:
@natacha since Penpot have been in favour of using Open Source applications.
Have you ever heard of https://cryptpad.org/ this is completely open source and you can also share files with other people. This is their GitHub repo GitHub - cryptpad/cryptpad: Collaborative office suite, end-to-end encrypted and open-source. they use the AGPL-3.0 licence
I’m new to Penpot. I’ve previously built two large design systems in Figma.
I think the design tokens feature is great. However, I’m not convinced that the current shared assets system works well in its current form. Let me explain.
When building a design system, you usually create it inside a dedicated project file. In that design system you define:
components
colors
typography
That part makes sense.
However, in that same project you would normally expect to define tokens that support things like multiple themes, branding variations, or white-label setups. These should exist as tokens rather than as assets.
The same applies to things like spacing scales and other foundational values. Ideally, these would live in a shared system that other projects can import. Then other files or projects could simply use the library and inherit:
components
semantic colors with selectable themes
shared spacing scales and layout values
This way, when defining gaps or spacing between elements, everything stays standardized and consistent across projects. And those are not part of components they are use as globals shared
Because of that, I’m not sure I understand the purpose of shared assets, aside from images or similar resources.
So far I really like the tool and I’m having fun using the MCP features.
Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding something or using the tool incorrectly. I’m watching as many of the available videos as I can.
At the moment, this part of the workflow is still unclear to me — or maybe the feature simply doesn’t exist yet.
Thank you for your work!
Thank you for sharing your insights!
Right now, I would say that typography and color assets are an alternative to using design tokens for typography and color. I did a deep dive on the differences between color assets and color tokens on the Penpot blog: Penpot deep dive: Color tokens vs asset colors
This is currently how design tokens work. The themes and sets can either be used on components that are published as a library, or used in the design files, or a combination of both. Any changes to the same named tokens and chosen theme in your design file will override those used in the library. You might find the recent hands-on we did on design tokens and design systems useful for showing these more advanced use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmVuRMf5Ojg (You can also find the demo files in this post: Penpot ✕ Tokens Studio Hands-On Demo, Feb 25th - #2 by LauraKalbag
I know the Penpot team are looking at the workflow for using tokens across multiple files and projects.
