Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what design tool you use. What is most important is that you can communicate your ideas effectively, and the people you’re working with can use and understand your designs.
Penpot was created to bridge the gap between design and development. It uses modern web technologies to ensure that what you see in Penpot will be the same as what is rendered by code in the browser, which makes it particularly valuable for app and web UI design.
Penpot also exports to SVG—scalable vector graphics—, JPG and PNG images, and PDF documents, making it also handy for all kinds of digital and print graphic design.
Penpot is also free with unlimited seats for your teams, whether you’re a designer, developer or designer-developer like me. So you can sign up and start creating designs without worrying about an expensive license or subscription.
It’s also open source; you can host Penpot for yourself or your team. I won’t explain how to do that in this course, but you can learn about self-hosting Penpot at penpot.app/self-host.
Sign up for Penpot
You can sign up for Penpot *for free* at penpot.app. You can sign up with your email address or using your Google, GitHub, and GitLab logins.
Penpot dashboard
Once you’ve signed up for Penpot, you’ll enter the dashboard area. Each Penpot user has your own personal team called _Your Penpot_. You can add new teams and switch between teams from the menu in the top left.
Each team has its own Projects, Drafts, Libraries and Fonts. Projects are like folders, they’re a way to group your team’s files. Drafts are just the default project for your Penpot files.
We’ll look more at Teams, Libraries and Fonts later.
Creating a Penpot file
There are a few ways you can create a new file in your Penpot Drafts, or any other Penpot project:
- You can use this big plus button area which is here when there aren’t any files yet.
- Or when you’re hovering or focusing on the project area, a plus button will appear alongside the project name.
Hit this button and you’ll create and open up your brand new file.
Your file will be created without a name. You can edit the name by double-clicking it in the top left of the Penpot workspace… Or, if you return to the Penpot dashboard by clicking the Penpot logo, you can use the menu that appears when you hover or focus on a file to rename the file.
2:45 min