--- title: "How to keep a design swipe file" description: "A design swipe file that stays useful: save whole pages, keep the fonts and colours, sort by what you'll need, and find things by colour and text." source: https://savepad.app/blog/design-swipe-file --- [Blog](https://savepad.app/blog) · 17 September 2025 # How designers keep a swipe file without it becoming a Pinterest board A design swipe file that stays useful: save whole pages, keep the fonts and colours, sort by what you'll need, and find things by colour and text. *A design swipe file in Savepad sorted by colour, with a palette pulled out of each saved page* **TLDR** - A moodboard is for one project. A swipe file is for every project after it. - Save the whole page, not a cropped screenshot of the hero. You’ll want the section below it one day. - Keep the font and the palette with the thing, so you don’t have to dig them out again. - Sort by what you’ll need (“pricing tables”, “empty states”), not by where you found it. ## The Pinterest board problem It starts well. A board called “UI inspo”. Then 1,400 pins later it’s an infinite scroll of beautiful things you can’t use: no idea where they came from, cropped to the pretty bit, half of them AI-generated, and no way to find “that nav with the pill buttons” except scrolling. Pinterest boards are lovely for a vibe. But at 11pm, designing a pricing page, what you actually want is six real pricing pages, fast. ## Save the whole thing *A mock homepage for a fictional dev tool, Tidepool* 0565 · tidepool.dev · full page *A font specimen card for the typeface Fraunces* 0662 · font · from lumen.io *A mock landing page for a fictional mattress brand, Dozy, with its palette* 0759 · dozy.co · palette · 5 colours Three saves from a design swipe file: a full page, a typeface, and the palette pulled from a landing page. - **Full-page screenshots, not crops.** The hero looked great, but a year later the thing you need is the footer, or the FAQ layout. The [full-page screenshot](https://savepad.app/blog/full-page-screenshot) post has every way to take one. - **Desktop and phone.** Same page, both widths. The mobile nav is often the more interesting design problem. - **The URL, always.** So you can go back and inspect it, or see if it changed. - **The font.** Note it, or save it. The [website font finder](https://savepad.app/blog/find-website-font) tells you what a page uses in one go. - **The palette.** Five hex codes you can paste into Figma, not “that nice orange”. ## Organise by what you’ll need Where you found it doesn’t matter. What it is does. - **By pattern:** Navigation, Heroes, Pricing, Empty states, Onboarding, Footers, Forms, 404s. - **By type:** Landing pages, Product UI, Email, Social, Print. - **By quality, with tags:** `#type-heavy`, `#dark`, `#illustration`, `#weird-good`. The [folders vs tags](https://savepad.app/blog/folders-vs-tags) post goes deeper on which is which. ## Find it by how it looks This is the bit a folder can’t do on its own. You remember “the one with the orange”, or “the one that said *pay as you grow*”. So search should work that way too: - **By colour.** Filter to everything with a warm orange in it. - **By text in the image.** The headline on a screenshot is searchable if something read it. - **By type.** Just fonts. Just palettes. Just full pages. That’s what Savepad does with every save: it pulls out five colours, reads the text in screenshots with OCR, and keeps fonts and palettes as their own save types. Masonry view for browsing, list view for “sort by date”. And no AI-generated images in your feed, because there’s no feed. Just your stuff. If you’re after somewhere to find new things rather than keep your own, the [design inspiration websites](https://savepad.app/blog/design-inspiration-websites) post is the list. The [moodboards use case](https://savepad.app/use-cases/moodboards) is for when you’re pulling a project board together from the swipe file. [Join the waitlist](https://savepad.app/#waitlist) ## Read these next - [How to find out what font a website is using: Three ways to identify a website's font in under a minute: your browser's DevTools, an extension, or a font matcher for images. Plus what to do once you've found it.](https://savepad.app/blog/find-website-font) - [How to use the Meta Ad Library to see every ad your competitors run: Search any brand's live Facebook and Instagram ads, spot the ones that are working, and save them before they get switched off.](https://savepad.app/blog/meta-ad-library) - [How to build a swipe file in Notion (and where it falls apart): Set up a swipe file in Notion with a database, a gallery view and the web clipper. Then the honest part: where it stops working, around the few-hundred-row mark.](https://savepad.app/blog/swipe-file-in-notion)