The twelve things worth borrowing from a website

You find a site you love and you want your thing to feel like it. So you tell the agent to make it look like that, or you describe the feeling — warmer, more editorial, less corporate — and what comes back is not it.

The problem isn't the model's taste. It's that "that site" is forty decisions bundled together, and you only wanted four of them. Until you say which four, nobody can act on it.

A site is a menu, not a template

The useful move is to stop treating a reference as one thing. Any site is a set of separable decisions, and you can take one without taking the rest. Twelve are worth naming, because in practice they're what people actually want:

Typography — the families, weights and sizes. Often the single most recognisable thing about a site, and the most portable.

Colour — the palette as values with roles: what's the background, what's the accent, what carries text.

Background — separate from colour, and people forget it. Flat paper? A gradient? Texture? Dark with a glow behind the hero?

Layout — container widths, column structure, how much the content is allowed to breathe.

Spacing — the rhythm. A generous site and a dense one can share a palette and feel nothing alike.

Components — the shape of buttons, cards, inputs. Radii, borders, shadows, and the states.

Depth and shape — whether things sit flat on the page or float, and how hard the edges are.

Animation — what moves when something appears or is hovered.

Motion and scroll — different from animation: what the page does as you travel down it.

Imagery — photography treatment, illustration style, whether images are full-bleed or contained.

Iconography — line weight, corner style, filled or outlined.

Vibe — the one that resists specifics: confident, playful, clinical, handmade. Worth naming even when it can't be measured, because it settles ties.

Why the split matters more than the list

The list isn't sacred. What matters is the habit it forces: when you're looking at a site you like, ask which of these am I actually reacting to?

It's almost never all of them. You loved a portfolio's typography and its photography is irrelevant to your dashboard. You want a fintech site's calm spacing but none of its coldness. Once you can say that, the instruction stops being a vibe and becomes a spec.

It also protects you from the thing everyone's worried about. Taking one site's type scale, another's palette and a third's motion doesn't produce a copy of any of them — it produces something that is recognisably yours, assembled from parts you chose deliberately. That's how designers have always worked. The difference is that they do the naming in their head.

Two sites, four choices

Say you're building a portfolio and you've saved a ceramics studio and a music-analytics dashboard.

From the studio you want typography — a confident serif display face, tight tracking — and its background, flat warm paper with no gradients. You do not want its layout, which is a gallery grid and wrong for your content.

From the dashboard you want exactly one thing: the accent colour, an acid green that stops the page from being polite. Nothing else. Its spacing is dense in a way that would ruin the calm you're borrowing from the studio.

That's four decisions from two sites, and it's a brief a person could execute from. Compare it to "warm and editorial with a bit of an edge" and you can see which one an agent can act on.

Naming is the whole skill

You don't need design vocabulary to do this. You need to look at what you saved and separate what you're reacting to from what happens to be next to it. That's what snapp's tagging is: twelve checkboxes on each site, so the naming happens as you browse instead of when you're trying to describe something from memory to a model that has never seen it.