Hi everyone!
I’m a product designer & developer currently transitioning to Penpot. I’ve spent the last few hours testing the tool while building a design system and the UI for a mobile-first app. So far, I’m genuinely loving Penpot, but I’ve bumped into two friction points that are honestly slowing down my workflow:
1. Auto-grouping components by Page in the Assets panel
I know components can be organized using manual folders or the / naming convention, and that works as a workaround. However, it would be a huge UX improvement if the Assets panel automatically grouped components by Page by default.
When structuring a design file, I usually keep dedicated pages like Icons, UI Kit, Design (Screens), etc. Having the library automatically reflect the document’s page hierarchy (or even grouping down to the parent Frame/Board level) would eliminate unnecessary manual sorting. Naturally, keeping the ability to toggle or use custom folders would be ideal so it doesn’t disrupt anyone’s current workflow.
2. Respecting Aspect Ratio lock when setting width or height to “Fill” (<->)
Right now, if I place an SVG, shape, or element (e.g., 200×100 px) with its aspect ratio locked (the padlock icon enabled), and then set its width to Fill (<->) inside a Flex container, the layout engine forces the width to fill the container but leaves the height untouched at its original fixed pixel value. As a result, the vector gets heavily distorted and squished.
In modern CSS, this is a solved problem: pairing width: 100% with native aspect-ratio and height: auto tells the rendering engine to recalculate the cross-axis dimension dynamically so the proportion is always preserved.
Currently, the workaround is quite painful: I have to set the width to Fill, note down the resulting pixel width, press Ctrl + Z, and manually type that exact number into the width input with the padlock closed so the height scales proportionally.
That said, I’m still fairly new to Penpot, so if there is already an existing feature or setting that handles this and I missed it, my apologies in advance!
Thank you so much for reading and for building such an incredible open-source tool. Cheers!
