Special edition: Open chat with the CEO of Penpot

Hello everyone 👋 

This week’s edition will be a special one: much less writing and much more talking. 

The scene of design tools is evolving and it’s evolving fast. As big players try to solidify their market position and squeeze out the gains (Figma, I’m talking about you), others are leaving the stage after long years of service (bye-bye, inVision!). And as always in such cases, new players emerge. Among many one that I’m particularly excited about is Penpot.

Penpot is an emerging design tool that is free, open-source, and fully based on open web standards. That means that in contrast with other popular choices:

• Penpot is fully hackable (you can create your own instance of it and customize it to the core) 

• designs in Penpot some of the same technologies as real websites which makes the designs much closer to reality and much easier to translate into real code (at least as long as you’re building for the web rather than e.g. for native mobile)

You might saw me writing about Penpot before. On Smashing Magazine, you can find 4 articles of mine about it.

Today, I want to share with you a new fruit of our collaboration. Some time ago, Penpot’s CEO invited me to an open chat that is now live and available for everyone to watch and listen on Youtube, Spotify and Podcasts.

In the chat, we’re talking about the changing role of designers in the modern digital product development process, the future of design tools, and of course about Penpot.

Let me know how you liked it!

Listen on Youtube

Listen on Spotify

That’s it for this week. Next week, I’ll be going back to our usual format with a new read about technical design skills.

Take care,

Mikolaj