Blog

Bringing Design Tokens to Penpot - An Open-Source Collaboration for the Design Systems Community

Written by

Sam Gordashko

Published on

Apr 17, 2025

Design Tokens just landed in Penpot, and we couldn't be more proud to be a part of the team that made it happen.

Penpot is the first design tool to offer native support for tokens, which is kind of a big deal for the Design Systems community.

At Tokens Studio, we believe that the people building Design Systems deserve better tools, more visibility, and a lot more respect. That's why we joined forces with Penpot to bring our expertise in Design Token technology to an open-source design tool being built with the Design Systems community in mind.

Design Tokens are the connective tissue between design and development. They turn color, typography, shadows, sizing, and spacing design decisions into data that can be shared across platforms, tools and technology. They open the door to automation, speed up development, and make scaling design systems feel effortless.

Most design tools treat tokens as an afterthought.

With native Design Tokens co-created with Tokens Studio, Penpot is a place where systems designers feel like first-class citizens. No need to break flow to open a plugin; tokens are a part of the workflow from ideation to iteration.

This isn’t just another feature. It’s a milestone for open-source design tooling and a big step forward for design systems everywhere.

What's new in Penpot

In true open-sourced spirit, we launched with a minimum-lovable product with the needs of systems designers in mind:

Create and manage Design Tokens for the essential design decisions (color, radius, dimensions, sizing, spacing, rotation, border width, opacity) in the W3C DTCG Token Format.
Token groups for bulk actions and optimal organization.
Values can be hard-coded, reference another Token, or calculated with support for math equations.
Token sets and themes for limitless flexibility.
Multi-dimensional theming allows your components to support as many clients, brands, platforms, and projects as needed.
Style Dictionary is running under the hood to transform your design decisions into developer-ready code.

And yes, this is just the beginning.

Keep an eye on our social media channels for updates on the roadmap.

Penpot & Tokens Studio - A shared vision

Penpot and Tokens Studio are aligned in something bigger than tooling:

We believe in openness, interoperability, and powering the pride behind great design systems.

Whether you use Penpot, Figma, Framer or something else entirely, your tokens should work everywhere. Your systems should scale. And your work should be respected.

We’re here to build the infrastructure that makes that possible—together.