Plasma Design System Leaps Forward with Migration to Penpot

Saturday, 25 October 2025  |  Andres Betts

Video version:

We’re excited to share a major milestone in the development of the Ocean Design System for the Plasma Desktop! The project is moving away from Figma and fully migrating to the open-source platform Penpot.

This shift was made possible by significant improvements in Penpot, which now supports critical features needed for a robust design system.

The Move to Penpot: Open Source and Component Cleanup

The team begun a clean-up and migration of all design assets into Penpot. We’ve created the Ocean Design Systems Foundations Library, which is the central Penpot file housing all our graphical assets. It contains all the foundational elements of the design system, but now features shared assets.

Progress Highlights in Penpot

Foundations and Shared Component

These are the second level, or more advanced design elements used in ui. Buttons, sliders, progress bars, etc. Using these elements, users are able to actually compose and deliver small UI elements for developers to use.

New Feature: Variants

A massive win for our design process is Penpot’s new support for variants. Variants allow us to group components with different states (e.g., a badge with an icon or an avatar). This makes it incredibly easy to design on the fly—you can drop a component and quickly switch its size, state, and type without having to manually redesign.

Exciting News from Penpot Fest 2025

The recent Penpot Fest brought some fantastic announcements that will further accelerate our work:

  • New Rendering Engine: Penpot is developing a new rendering engine based on Skia and Web Assembly (like what Chrome uses) to dramatically improve performance and speed, especially for math-oriented design work. We’ve already signed up for the beta!
  • Layer Blur and Tokens: They are bringing layer blur into the system and allowing for the creation of more tokens for things like typography and complex multi-layered shadows.
  • Better Shape Control: The new engine also promises better shape control, which is great news as we explore creating our Ocean icons directly in Penpot.

Sharing the Library

We’ve now published the first iterations of our Ocean Design Foundations library. To enable worldwide collaboration, we are periodically exporting the Penpot file and uploading it to our GitLab repository (currently hosted in a personal repo, but moving to a Plasma-backed one soon). This means anyone can clone the repository and work with the same assets we do.

Link here: https://invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design

What’s Next?

While these UI elements are not yet live in Plasma, we are preparing for the completion of the Union engine. Our current focus remains on:

  1. Migrating the rest of our assets to Penpot.
  2. Building new application icons to replace the existing colorful ones.

We welcome any open-source designers to join this exciting effort!