Swipe file examples from marketers, designers and devs
What real swipe files look like: the public ones worth bookmarking, and how marketers, designers, PMs and devs set up their own.
TLDR
- The best swipe files are boring to look at: a few folders, lots of saves, a note on the good ones.
- Public swipe files (Marketing Examples, Really Good Emails, Mobbin) are great for browsing. Your own is what you use on a deadline.
- Marketers sort by channel, designers by pattern, PMs by flow, devs by problem.
- Mine’s public, if you want to steal the structure.
If you’ve never seen one
What a swipe file is is its own post. Short version: every example you’ve seen and liked, kept somewhere you can find it again. This post is the “ok but show me” part.
Public swipe files worth bookmarking
Someone else did the collecting. These are the good ones.
- Marketing Examples by Harry Dry. Short teardowns of copy, SEO and landing pages, each one with the reason it works. The copywriting section is the best free course on the internet.
- Really Good Emails. Thousands of marketing and product emails, searchable by type. Welcome emails, receipts, “we’ve updated our terms”, all of it.
- Mobbin. Screens and full flows from real apps. Onboarding, paywalls, settings pages. Designers and PMs live in here.
- Swiped. Classic ads and sales letters with notes. Old school, still useful.
- Developer Marketing Examples on mktto.dev. Launch weeks, docs, dev-tool homepages. Full disclosure: Flo Merian and I run mktto.dev together, so I’m biased. If you market to developers, start here anyway.
- Growth.Design. Product case studies drawn as comics. Sounds gimmicky, and they’re still the fastest way to explain a psychology principle to your team.
Browse them when you’re bored. But notice what happens when you need one specific example at 4pm on a Thursday: you’re scrolling someone else’s categories for something they may never have saved.
What a marketer’s swipe file looks like
Sorted by channel, because that’s how the work comes in. “We need new Meta ads”, “fix the welcome email”, “the pricing page is converting like sh*t”.
Folders: Paid social, Landing pages, Pricing, Lifecycle email, Launches, Competitors. Tags for what the thing is doing (#urgency, #social-proof, #ugc). A note on anything that’s there for a reason.
The email folder is where most swipe files are weakest. One welcome email is barely a reference. The welcome email, the day 2 nudge, the day 7 “still there?” and the gap between them is the actual thing you want to steal. I wrote more about that in how to keep an email swipe file.
What a designer’s swipe file looks like
Sorted by pattern: Heroes, Navigation, Pricing tables, Empty states, 404s, Type, Colour. Lots of full-page screenshots, because a hero out of context tells you nothing about the page’s rhythm. Fonts and palettes saved as themselves, not as a screenshot of a font.
For where to find them, see design inspiration websites worth bookmarking, and for type, how to find out what font a website uses.
What a PM’s swipe file looks like
Sorted by flow: Onboarding, Checkout, Upgrade prompts, Settings, Cancellation. Each one is a sequence of screens in order, because step 3 of onboarding only makes sense after step 2. Plus competitors’ pricing pages, saved every quarter so you can see what they changed.
What a dev’s swipe file looks like
Sorted by problem, and it’s mostly text. The snippet that finally fixed the Postgres upsert. The docs page for one config flag. A repo someone mentioned on a podcast. Docs sites they’d like theirs to look like (Stripe’s, always Stripe’s).
Mine
Mine is public at my.savepad.app/@gunnyganatra. The folders follow the headings of my awesome-marketing and awesome-developer-marketing lists on GitHub: B2B marketing, case studies, design inspiration, newsletters, books, podcasts. It’s mostly links and it’s mostly for me, which is kinda the point.
Steal the structure, or start from a template. Savepad lets you make any space, folder or tag public and keep the rest private, which is how mine works.