In this 10-hour video course, you'll learn core skills and techniques for user interface design, from simple graphics to complex patterns and design systems.
17:37 min
Follow along our first hands-on video as Laura shows you how to recreate a fountain pen design in Penpot. This video covers fundamental design tool skills including:
17:37 min
Let's start with our first hands on. I'm going to show you some of the fundamentals of using a design tool, including creating shapes and paths to draw things with. I'm going to recreate this pen design here.
First off, we want to start with a circle so I use the ellipse tool, select it, and draw from point to point to create that circle, just by dragging and holding down the mouse. And now I want a rectangle. Now I do the same with the rectangle shape and draw a sort of a square -like shape.
Now these aren't quite the right size. This is supposed to be the hole in the nib, and this is supposed to be the grip part, the bit that you hold. So I am gonna make this much smaller. Now I have a few ways of doing that: in the design panel here, I can see the width and the height of the selected shape. And I can change these values just by typing in. So I could say 100 width, 100 height, and that sets the height of this little circle. I can also drag it from one corner to make it bigger and smaller.
But you can see sometimes when I drag it, it ends up a lot wider than taller. It's not a very nice looking circle. I want to be able to fix the height and width so they grow and shrink in proportion to each other. To do that, let me set it back to a square. So we'll say 90 by 90. And we use this little lock icon here alongside the widths and the height to constrain its wits and height to each other. This means now if I drag to change it, it's going to keep the same widths and height, and if I change the values in the box, it will also keep that same height, change the height value to match the width. And I'll do the same with this square. Oh, this is still too big. Let's make that 20 no too small, 30, and we'll make this nearer to I think one 50 by one 50. It's not perfect, but that'll do for now. And I'll make sure that stays square too.
Now I want to make another rectangle for the handle of the pen, so I'm going to copy and paste this rectangle for another rectangle. There are different ways we can do this. We can right click on the shape, bring up this menu and select copy, and then paste onto the canvas. You can't see it, and that's because it's hiding behind the original rectangle.
I can also copy and paste using keyboard shortcuts so I can hold down command and C, or control and C, and then command and V, or control and V to paste the shape. I can also just do it quicker in one step, and that is to use the duplicate option so I can right click and choose duplicate here, or I can just select the shape and do command or control D, and that will duplicate, yes, another shape. If you end up with too many shapes and you want to delete them, you can right click and delete right at the bottom of the menu here. Or you can just select your shape and use the backspace key to delete it.
Let me change the shape of this rectangle so it's more like this handle shape. To do that, I'm going to deselect constraining the proportions because I want this to be long rather than square, and I'll just pull that out so it's looking a little closer to the shape.
Now, you might notice that this is looking a bit boxy so far, and that's because we want to add in these rounded corners that we've got. So I'm going do this by selecting first my square shape. And this box here is the radius box. So this allows me to set the radius for the shape I'm going to set this to... let's try 20. And sometimes it can be a bit difficult to see the radius behind these little corners here. If I deselect it, you can see that's got a nice curve to that corner radius. And I'm do the same for this long rectangle, and I'll set that to maybe 15.
And you can see the bottom of this rectangle has much more rounded corners than the top is, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change just the bottom rounded corners and not the top. The way I can do this is alongside this radius box here is this independent radius option. If I press this, it opens up four separate boxes so I can choose different values. For the top left, the top right, the bottom left, and the bottom right of the shape. So for this, I want to make the bottom left 50 and the bottom right 50. Maybe a bit more than that even. I'll do 80 and 80. And you see this is starting to look a lot more like this shape here.
If I want to position these shapes, I can always drag them around the canvas by clicking and holding and dragging, or these other properties below the width and the heights of the shape are there, X and Y coordinates. So the x axis is where it is from left to right. And the Y axis is where it is from top to bottom, so I can always use that to specify, oh, I want to nudge these over using the arrow keys or put in the value that I want for that position. I can also drag to select multiple shapes at once and then drag those around together.
When I have all of these shapes selected, it will say mixed. If the values of the selected shapes are different from each other, you could change them so they're all the same, but that's not really the effect that you want. Remember, you can always undo by doing command or control Z or Z if you're American.
Next up, I want to draw the nib shape of this pen. I'm going to do this using the Path tool, which is this one here, and this brings up a whole new menu and I can just start clicking and plotting paths as a shape. So I'm going to start with the bottom. I'm just gonna do half the nib to begin with. You'll see why later. And I'm just going to very roughly sketch out the shape of the nib. What you might have noticed there is that I started at one point and I created the shape, and then I finished by selecting that that first point over again. Let me try that again. Going to start with the bottom and go to the top, the very tip of the nib. Then where this is kind of curvy shape, I'm just gonna draw it in as a square right now. Then back to the base, and then to finish my shape, I'm going to select that first point again. And if I want to exit this pen mode, I can press escape. Now. I have two parts here for the nib. I'm going to pick the better one, which I think is this one. Let me delete that first one.
Okay. Now you can see this is looking a bit boxy right now. It needs some smooth curves. I'm going to add what we call a Bezier curve in. Now, to do this, I'm going to double click my shape to go back into the path editing mode, and I'm gonna use this little arrow key here, which allows me to select particular points on my path. So this is a point that I want to turn into a curve, and I'm actually going to delete this point. So I'm going to select this point. And use the backspace key, and that will delete the path while keeping it as a continuous path the whole way around the shape.
So let me select that point again. And this tool here allows me to turn it into a curve. So if I press the button curve now, if I zoom in so you can see this a little better. Now this has become a curve and this is the origin point of the curve. And each of these square boxes here allow me to adjust the shape of the curve. So you can see if I pull it in this direction, it pulls the curve out. If I push it in that direction, it pushes the curve in. I can make it a much shallower curve by moving it closer to the point, or I can make it a much steeper curve by moving it away. And I want to try to replicate this shape that I have down here. So that symbols moving this point as well. I can just drag these points out, and maybe this is a little closer to the top here. I can still move these. It tends to be more aesthetically pleasing if the distance of these square points are roughly the same.
Okay, so there we have the beginnings of my nib. Now I want to draw just a line down the middle of the nib here. And drawing a line is quite easy. You're just drawing another shape like this again, but you're not joining it back to the beginning of the shape. So I'm going to select this and I will draw my line. I'm going get it alongside this nib so that we can see what we're doing. So I to do one point and it goes down. If I hold down the shift key, it allows me to snap into cleaner angles, which can avoid you ending up with a slightly wonky line. So I'm gonna do that, and then I can, once I'm holding down shift, I can very easily move my cursor up and down without it starting to change the position of the line. And it'll probably be about halfway down. There we go. Now you see, I don't wanna join it back to the beginning again. So in order to exit the pen, just press escape and escape again. And there we go. I've got a little line.
I also have this tool here, this pencil tool for drawing free hand lines. So say for example, I wanted to draw ink coming out of my pen, I can select this tool. And outta the top of my pen, I can use my mouse to draw a free hand curve however I like. Now, I've got a pretty steady hand with my mouse. Um, it's gonna be very difficult to do on a track pad, and if I just let go of the shape, that's created a path, if I choose it here, you can see it's made up of many, many different points and there are no curves.
On these points, you could add the curves in later if you wanted. You probably won't find that many uses for the pen tool unless you are going to start doing illustration in Penpot. I mean, you could try, but it's not really what it's designed for. Right. So I'm just going to delete that for now. So as it gets out of our way.
I've got this one half of pen nib, but I want it to be a full pen nib. That's one of the ways that I create symmetrical shapes is I often just create one half of the shape and then I can duplicate that. So I'm gonna use Command D, control D to duplicate it, and then I can flip it so it's the mirror image and can be the other half of this shape. If I right click, I can choose to flip vertical. That's the wrong way, let's undo that. Or I can flip horizontal. And so now if I move these two shapes together, I have my nib shape. It's not quite perfect, but it's getting there. It's getting there.
I want to add some fill colors now to get the color to look more like what we've got here. This will really start making it look more like that pen. I will start off by selecting my handle, and this already has a default fill color of gray, and I can select this swatch here to open up the color picker, and I can choose any color I want.
I can drag around this spectrum to choose, I don't know, default shade of blue that I like if I like the brightness of that color, but I want it to be a slightly different hue. I can drag in here to get a different hue. As well. And if I just want it to be the same as a color that I've already got on the canvas, I can either choose from my recent colors down here, or I can use this dropper tool to select an existing color on the canvas, and that will make it the same.
I want to add a stroke as well so that it matches this outline style that I've got. So I'm going to use the plus button to add a stroke. There's not one already. By default, this has just added a one pixel stroke, which is pretty thin and you can't really see it underneath the green select line. And so I'm gonna make that a little thicker.
I'm gonna make that maybe... there we go, about six. Oh, I've managed to add two there, so let me take that away. And this color, if I really want to match this existing design. It's actually more of a very dark brown than a black, so I'm going to select the swatch to open the color picker and use the color picker to pick that brown color instead.
Now, I don't want to go through all of that all over again in order to get the colors that I want for this shape. So what I can do now is if I select this, I'm going to change the fill and you can see the recent colors have appeared in the bottom, and I'm gonna pick that same blue and the stroke. I'll make that six again, and I can pick from the recent colors that brownish color.
I had to drag that so that it is a little closer. And maybe nudge using the arrow tools to overlap those strokes there. And I want to do the same for my nib. So right now these are two separate shapes. So if I add a fill color to the shape, which will be the yellow that I want, so I'll pick that yellow color using the color dropper. I'm choosing escape to close the color picker. And I will do the same for the stroke. We used six. And pick from the recent colors there.
Now, I don't want this line going down the middle of my nib. I want this to be one continuous shape. So the way that I can do that is if I select both sides of my nib, I can use these little operations here at the top to combine my layers. So there's a few options here that I'll show you later, but for now, I just want the first one to create a union between these two shapes. Which turns it into one shape. Now it's a little bit wide, so I'm just gonna nudge that smaller. And now it just treats it as if it is one shape. Maybe it's a little tall as well. And I want to position this line, make that the same as the other lines, and to position that in the right location. Little bit nudging there, and I'm gonna select both of those shapes and move them here. Now I've got this.
This shape is overlapping the circle, so you can't really see it anymore. Now this is because of layering, and I'll go into this in a little more detail later, but for now, if we just look into this layers panel, we can see that the ellipse that we used for the circle is below this union of the nib, and so I'm just going to drag it up to above the union shape of the nib and the fill color for that needs to be brown as well, so I'll select that and choose brown and drag it into the right location.
Finally. I want to make my pen at an angle like this one here. Now, in order to do that, I want to move all the shapes as one shape. Right now. These are all just individual shapes. In order to do that, I'm going to group the shapes together so that any transformation I apply to them is applied to the shapes as a group. If I decided to select all of these individually like I've done here, and choose to change the angle, which is what this little rotation input is for, so I changed that to, what is it, about 45 degrees. That doesn't look any good, does it? Because they're all oriented differently, and so their idea of 45 degrees is all different.
I need to bring them together in one group so they get treated as one shape. So I'll undo that. Now I've got them all selected and I can right click to group my items. I can also use the command or control G keyboard shortcut, and then I can use 45 degrees rotation and it will set it at an angle. It's of course minus 45 degrees. So I'll do that. And there we go. We have our pen design. It's not quite identical, but I'd say that is close enough.
17:37 min
You can read more about shapes, paths, selections, and more in the Penpot User Guide:
The demo file features the example from the video on making your mark. Download the .penpot file and import the file into Penpot to try it out for yourself.
