Guide
How to organize design inspiration
Designers save more than anyone and lose more than anyone. The gap between seeing something good and needing it is measured in months, which is precisely how long context survives.
Three habits make the difference, and none of them is a folder structure.
01 · Habit one
Save the detail, not the whole page.
You almost never want the entire screen. You want the empty state, the way that table handles overflow, the button's pressed state, one heading's spacing.
Crop to the thing. A cropped screenshot is self-describing in a grid; a full page is another rectangle of grey.
02 · Habit two
Describe it the way you'll look for it.
You will not search "fintech dashboard". You'll search "the dark one with the tiny monospace labels". Any words you add should be appearance-first: colour, type, density, mood, medium.
Project-based tags feel organised at save time and are close to useless at recall time, because the reference usually gets reused on a different project.
Tag for the eye, not for the brief.
03 · Habit three
Keep where it came from.
The source is the difference between a reference and a rumour. Knowing which product, studio or article a detail came from lets you go back for more, credit it honestly, and judge whether it was a considered decision or an accident.
It's also a strong retrieval clue: you often remember the company long after you've forgotten the detail.
04 · Where Shelf fits
A reference library that describes itself.
Shelf reads the text inside each reference, writes a short local description of what it shows, keeps the source and the moment, and gathers visually and thematically related references into collections without you tagging anything.
For team libraries, shared boards or client presentation, you'll still want a dedicated tool. Shelf is for one person's eye.
If this idea interested you…
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.