Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 at 23:47

PenPot version 1.0 released on Tuesday, January 31, 2023. Released with the slogan "Bring Design Freedom to your Product team", it is the first official stable release of the new web-based, collaborative design & prototyping platform. Its purpose is to design User Interface (UI) of any computer program. To many people in UI & UX field, PenPot can be viewed as a very good Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) alternative to Figma. In this article we convey to you the news, introduce it, quick guide to use it and some useful information to learn more about it. Finally, we'd love to say congratulations and welcome to PenPot!

  (A screenshot of PenPot front page)
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About PenPot

PenPot is a web-based, collaborative design & prototyping program developed by Kaleidos Open Source company from Spain. It is free/libre open source software (FOSS) licensed under Mozilla Public License, written in Clojure language and developed publicly at GitHub. Quoting the website: "Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform for product teams." Visit the company at kaleidos.net. Visit PenPot at penpot.app.

 

Release Video 

PenPot Project officially aired a release video along with Questions and Answers section at YouTube following v1.0 release. (If you are concerned about software freedom, you can watch it via Invidious or NewPipe.)


Features

  • Free libre open source software (FOSS)
  • Draw user interface (UI)
  • Design user experience (UX)
  • Prototype web & apps
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) based
  • Open standard (SVG), no proprietary vendor lock-in
  • Team collaboration (multiuser)
  • Templates and libraries
  • Self-hostable
  • Deployable using Docker
  • ... read more with demos at Features Page.

 

 (PenPot user interface: showing a preloaded template "PenPot Design System v2.0" with artboard, layers, assets, design, prototype and inspect sections visible on the screen)
 

How To Use

To use PenPot quickly:

1. Go to design.penpot.app

2. Login into your account. Create one if you did not have one.

3. Click New File.

Alternatively, you can click one of Libraries & Templates. At the moment, PenPot offers "PenPot Design System", "Wireframing Kit", "Ant Design UI Kit" and "Cocomaterial".

4. Double-click the project's file. 

5. PenPot designer will open in a new tab. 

6. Start designing in the new tab. 

7. To exit, click PenPot logo to the top corner.


(PenPot welcome page: this is what the user will see after logged in and the username is visible to bottom-left)


How To Self-Host

PenPot published Self-Hosting Guide for the users to install PenPot web application into their own server.

 

 
 (A screenshot of PenPot Self-Hosting Guide web page)


Similar Applications

  • Figma 
  • Adobe XD
  • Balsamiq 
  • InVision
  • Affinity Designer
  • Akira (*)
  • Quant-UX (*)
(*) Free/libre open source software.


How To Get Involved

If you are UI/UX designers or programmers, PenPot Project invites you to develop the PenPot software in public together. They hosted their source code at GitHub/Penpot. They do not open donation as they have their own funding model explained at Penpot: Our Time Has Come.


Related Resources

Community forum: a place where PenPot users and friends discuss about how to use Penpot together.

LibreArts in 2021
User Guide: all tutorials and documentation about using PenPot.

Open Source Design: a community where PenPot is member of along with other awesome FOSS projects for digital design creativity. They recommend PenPot in their special page.

LibreArts: formerly called Libre Graphics World, it's a community of artists who use and develop libre software (also called free software and open source). They regularly publish news about PenPot development long before it reached 1.0.

PIXLS.us: a community of photographer and graphic artists who use libre software. They are friends with LibreArts and regularly publish newsletters and many of them contain PenPot news. 



References 

 





This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.