What is a swipe file? And how to build one you'll use
TLDR: A swipe file is where you save every example you've seen and liked, so you can reference it in the future.
TLDR
- A swipe file is every ad, landing page, email, and headline that made you go hmmm, kept so you can steal from it later.
- It saves you from the blank page, and it’s the fastest way to get design and dev on the same page in a kickoff.
- Most people keep theirs across 14 apps, which means they can’t find anything in it.
- Keep it in one place, save things the moment you see them, sort them later, and make sure you can search the words inside.
So, what is a swipe file?
A collection of examples you find inspiring and think are worth saving. Landing pages, blog posts, emails, ads, videos, commercials, typography, UI components. Anything that has ever made you go hmmm.
The “swipe” part is the honest part. You’re going to borrow from them. Not copy, borrow. The structure of a pricing page, the hook of a six-second ad, the subject line of a cart abandonment email that actually got you to finish checkout.
Copywriters have kept them for about a hundred years, in actual shoeboxes. Harry’s Marketing Examples is a great public one, sorted by content, SEO, social, CRM, and case studies.
Why bother?
Because starting from a blank canvas is slow and mostly pointless. Somebody has solved your problem before, probably twice, and one of them did it well.
- It saves time. You start a project with five tested references instead of zero.
- It beats writer’s block. Staring at a blank doc is real. Scrolling 40 great headlines is a much better warm-up.
- It helps you test. Different examples give you different angles to try, and something to point at when you explain why.
- It keeps you current. Between Supabase’s launch weeks, ad reads that go viral and every second homepage looking like Linear, a lot happens. A swipe file is how you keep up without keeping 60 tabs open.
- It gets everyone on the same page. Kickoff for a new homepage with design and engineering in 30 minutes? Three references do more than three paragraphs of brief.
What goes in one?
For marketers: ads (grab them from the Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn ad libraries), landing pages, pricing pages, onboarding and lifecycle emails, whole email sequences, popups, case studies, launch videos, billboards, podcast ad reads.
For designers: UI screenshots, full-page captures, type, colour palettes, motion, empty states, 404 pages.
For product people: onboarding flows, checkout flows, changelogs, upgrade prompts, settings pages, the way a competitor’s pricing page looked last quarter.
And for devs: the snippet that worked, the docs page for that one config flag, the repo someone mentioned on a podcast.
Where people keep them (and why it breaks)
In a Notion page. In a Slack DM to yourself. In Gmail stars, X bookmarks, a Figma page called “refs DO NOT DELETE” and a desktop folder of screenshots named Screenshot 11.02.47.png.
Each of those works for about a month. Then you have 14 of them, none of them search the text in a screenshot, half the links are dead and the one example you need, the one that said “limited edition”, is in there somewhere. Good luck.
How to build one you’ll actually use
- One place. Not one per project, not one per app. One.
- Save it the moment you see it. Two taps, from wherever you are. If saving is annoying, you won’t.
- Sort it later. Once a week, in bulk. Saving and sorting are different jobs.
- Keep the whole thing. A screenshot of an email loses the subject line. A link to a landing page loses the page when they redesign it. Keep a copy.
- Make it searchable by what’s inside. You won’t remember the file name. You’ll remember three words from the headline.
- Keep the order when order matters. An onboarding run is a sequence. Day 0, day 2, day 7. One email out of it is barely a reference.
If you want a head start, steal the folders and tags from the swipe file template, have a look at swipe file examples from marketers, designers, and devs, or start with just words in a copywriting swipe file.
That’s more or less the list we built Savepad around. Ads, pages, emails, and sequences, saved in two clicks, sorted in bulk, and found by the words inside them. No AI deciding what mattered to you.
Or keep using the shoebox. You do you.