Penpot 2.5: Elevating Design with Gradient UI and Shareable Board Links

Penpot, the widely adopted open-source interface design and prototyping platform, has officially released version 2.5. This significant update underscores Penpot’s evolution from an alternative design tool into a powerful, professional-grade platform. With features such as a reimagined gradients interface, board-specific link sharing, improved CSS copy-paste support, and a more responsive UI, Penpot 2.5 delivers tangible benefits to product teams, designers, and developers alike.

This release isn’t just about patching minor bugs or refining performance—it introduces foundational improvements that elevate the creative and collaborative process. Penpot 2.5 reflects the project’s long-term vision of empowering designers and developers with a fully open-source, standards-driven platform that competes head-to-head with proprietary tools.

Revamped Gradients UI for Enhanced Creative Control

One of the most significant highlights of Penpot 2.5 is the complete overhaul of its gradients interface. The new gradients UI is designed with clarity and flexibility in mind, providing designers with enhanced tools to define and manipulate complex gradients effortlessly.

With support for multi-stop gradients, Penpot now allows users to create detailed color transitions beyond the traditional two-point linear model. Designers can add multiple color stops, fine-tune their positions, and interact with gradient handles directly on the canvas—offering real-time visual feedback. The addition of radial gradients further expands visual expression, making circular or elliptical gradient designs perfect for modern UI backgrounds and illustrations.

This intuitive interface ensures that even intricate gradient designs are handled with speed and precision, bringing Penpot in line with professional expectations seen in mainstream tools like Figma and Adobe XD, but with the transparency and control that open-source advocates expect.

Streamlined Collaboration with Shareable Board Links

In today’s distributed work environments, collaboration is central to modern design workflows. Recognizing this, Penpot 2.5 introduces a much-requested feature: shareable links to individual boards within a design file.

Previously, sharing a design file in Penpot meant inviting collaborators to the entire project space or manually guiding them to specific boards or components. With this update, each board now has a unique, shareable URL, enabling contributors to land directly on the relevant section. Whether for a stakeholder presentation, design review, or development handoff, this improvement significantly reduces communication overhead and enhances project clarity.

This enhancement marks an essential step in making Penpot more efficient for larger teams and multi-stakeholder environments. It also sets a precedent for future collaborative features that may integrate version control, permissions, or team-specific workflows.

Simplified Style Management and CSS Sharing

Penpot 2.5 introduces a series of utility upgrades aimed at improving how designers manage styles across files and collaborate with front-end developers. One key addition is the ability to copy and paste visual styles and CSS declarations directly between elements.

Designers can now quickly duplicate fills, strokes, shadows, and other layer properties without manually re-entering values, saving time and ensuring consistency across designs. The ability to copy CSS properties enables developers to pull accurate, real-time style values directly from the design file, narrowing the gap between design and implementation.

Moreover, users can now copy plain text from within the design canvas to the clipboard, streamlining tasks such as content validation, translations, and data entry. Together, these features strengthen the bridge between design and development, addressing a key pain point Penpot aims to solve.

Automatic Board Resizing for Better Layout Management

File management and layout efficiency are often overlooked aspects of UI design software. Penpot 2.5 addresses this with the introduction of board resizing based on content dimensions. This feature automatically adjusts a board’s size to fit the elements it contains snugly, eliminating unnecessary whitespace and improving visual cleanliness.

For designers managing multiple boards or presenting responsive layouts, this change ensures better organization without manual adjustments. It also helps when exporting assets or preparing presentations, as content appears more structured and professionally aligned.

This content-aware resizing capability supports a better export workflow. Boards no longer require tedious frame adjustments or pixel-perfect manual resizing, allowing users to focus more on their designs and less on formatting.

Enhanced Layer Renaming for Improved File Organization

As projects grow, maintaining file structure becomes increasingly important. In response, Penpot 2.5 introduces a new feature that allows selected layers to be renamed automatically using their parent board names. This is instrumental in team environments where naming conventions play a critical role in design documentation and development handoffs.

By automating this process, Penpot reduces human error and accelerates the organization of design files. It’s a subtle but impactful change that aligns with the platform’s larger goal of reducing friction and improving clarity in complex projects.

Improved User Experience and Visual Enhancements

Penpot 2.5 isn’t just about significant feature additions—it also refines how users interact with the platform daily. Several subtle but meaningful UX enhancements are included in this release:

• Sidebar filters help users quickly find and isolate components or layers, especially useful in large design systems.
• Redesigned file status indicators now provide clearer visibility into the current state of the file—whether it’s saved, in progress, or has unsaved changes.
• Updated comments and mention notifications ensure feedback loops remain tight and traceable, keeping teams in sync.
• Improved visual cues across the interface make the experience more responsive and easier to navigate for both novice and experienced designers.

These refinements may not grab headlines, but they improve the overall feel of the product, reduce cognitive load, and support productivity at scale.

Conclusion

Penpot 2.5 is more than just an iterative update—it’s a comprehensive enhancement that brings professional-grade features to an open-source platform. From the powerful new gradients editor to board link sharing, style copying, and more intelligent UX, this release caters to designers and developers aiming to streamline collaboration and elevate their design processes.

By listening to its community and staying focused on real-world workflows, Penpot continues to evolve into a formidable alternative in the interface design landscape. With version 2.5, it proves that open-source can be not only viable but also visionary.