October 19, 2025

Open Source & Open Mind

I was very fortunate to attend Penpot Fest 2025 on Oct 9 and 10 in Madrid, Spain. I was there to take it all in, not to speak or facilitate. To be honest, I felt a bit like an outsider—I haven’t participated in their past events, and I’ve only just begun getting to know their amazing community and team.

Because of this, I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect. Let me tell you what I learned.

Opening day of Penpot Fest.

Penpot is an open source design tool

From their website:

“Penpot is the web-based open-source design tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers.”

When you first fire up Penpot, it will feel familiar to you. But under the covers it’s all web technology. That means it has native support for CSS flex and grid along with other open standards like SVG, HTML, and CSS. One impressive feature you may appreciate is that it has native token support based on the standards being developed by the DTCG. You can also self host and have unlimited files and users. Of course it also has a plugin system, variations, templates and libraries, and most of the other features you would expect from a tool intended to be used by digital design and development teams at scale.

Closing day of Penpot Fest with Medet and Pablo.

Penpot is a mindset

While the product itself is compelling, that wasn’t my biggest takeaway from Penpot Fest. From the very beginning, the whole event felt different. In fact, I haven’t said much about it since returning home because I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on the root of the feeling I left with.

After processing it for a week, I think I understand. Penpot is more than a tool, it’s a mindset. Because the people behind the tool care so much about access to high-quality software (and probably for many other reasons), they’ve built Penpot as an open-source tool. Penpot fest was, in some ways, a celebration of open-source. Alongside the presenters from Penpot itself were folks from the Wikimedia Foundation, CGGE, Ghost, and Blender.

Each of these speakers brought part of the open-source ethos to life for me. To hear them share about the amazing things they’ve accomplished—in education, bringing up the next generation of designers and builders, or even out in major industry—with this community-driven mindset was inspiring.

There was resonance here for me. Without knowing it, I’ve started something similar in my own way. The approach you and I have taken with The Question is, in some ways, an open-source worldview toward learning. Each week, we rely on the community to share their experiences and then analyze and synthesize those experiences into something we can all learn from. At the beginning of Penpot Fest, I felt like an outsider, but by the end, I wondered if I had found my people.

A powerful panel of women, expertly facilitated by Laura Kalbag, answering all our questions!

There is something powerful about this mindset. I stumbled on it with The Question, and then again in attending Penpot Fest. I’ll be going forward with much more intention, looking for ways to put this mindset to use in my work alongside design system teams and in the larger design system community.

Get involved

I don’t know where you are in your journey. But I know that there is always space for community work. There are a lot of ways you can be part of something bigger. Here are just a couple:

• Sign up for Penpot and consider whether it might be a good fit for your work
• Answer The Question and come join in the deep discussions—we need your experience and perspective to make it valuable
• Contribute to an open-source project—so many need help with design and with just a few hours a week or month, you could make a big impact
• Next year, join me at Penpot Fest and we’ll hang out with the larger community!

Stay in learning mode,

Ben

Writing Event