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!
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About PenPot
Release Video
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.
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.
Similar Applications
- Figma
- Adobe XD
- Balsamiq
- InVision
- Affinity Designer
- Akira (*)
- Quant-UX (*)
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.
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| LibreArts in 2021 |
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.