The biggest frustration with most design-reference tools is that they give you everything. You want the hero section's color palette, but you get 200 values including footer links, cookie banners, and third-party widgets.
Inspect Mode solves this at the source.
How it works
When you activate Inspect Mode from the AssetSnip panel, the cursor changes and every element on the page becomes selectable. Move your mouse around — you'll see a highlight box tracking whichever section you're hovering over, similar to DevTools element selection.
Click once on any section, and AssetSnip scopes its analysis to just that element and its children. The panel updates instantly to show:
- Only the colors used inside that section
- Only the fonts applied to that subtree
- Only the images contained within it
Click elsewhere to move the selection. Click the same spot again to deselect and return to the full-page view.
Why this matters
Competitive research without the mess
When you're researching a competitor's UI, you generally care about one or two specific components — their pricing card, their navigation, their hero CTA. Inspect Mode means you capture a clean palette from that one component, not a soup of every color the whole page uses.
Faster iteration on a single component
If you're tweaking a component at work and you want to match the exact font and spacing from a reference, inspect that one element. You'll have the size scale, weight, and family in seconds — without scrolling through a list of 40 fonts detected across the whole site.
Cleaner library
Assets saved from an Inspect capture are tagged with the source URL and the element context. Your library stays organized without manual labelling.
Tips
- Use it on component libraries — sites like Shadcn's docs, Radix UI, or Material Design are goldmines. Inspect individual components and save their color and spacing system.
- Combine with full-page view — run a full-page capture first to get the global brand palette, then use Inspect Mode to pull component-level specifics.
- Works on iframes — AssetSnip's inspector can cross iframe boundaries on many sites, which is useful for embedded design previews or Storybook instances.
Inspect Mode is one of those features that seems small until you use it once. After that, going back to full-page scraping feels like selecting everything with Ctrl+A when you only wanted one word.