Elizabeth Goodspeed on the power and perils of the mockup

About 15 years ago, the coolest thing you could possibly do with a poster you designed was to take a picture of it in front of your face. If you don’t remember this era, you might remember another like it: business cards floating in space, stationery in dramatic shadow or objects surrounded by clouds. Mockups like these have long been integral to the designer’s toolkit, but their role and influence have significantly evolved over the past decade. We’ve seen a surge in the variety and complexity of mockups, as designers increasingly innovate and craft more intricate and impactful scenarios – and reshape industry norms in the process. This shift not only changes how we present our work, but also fundamentally redefines our definition of design production.

It’s impractical, if not impossible, for most individuals or small teams to personally create the polished documentation that the competitive design market demands. Thankfully, there are now dozens of indie mockup producers to patronise – such as Mock Reality, Layers, Mockup Maison, Darkroom and Various Formats – each specialising in a particular style, from CGI-rendered minimalism to eclectic surrealist fantasy lands. As the bespoke mockup industry expands, the creativity required to distinguish one’s mockups has also begun to parallel the creativity needed to create a consumer-facing project that will exist in the real world. Designers making mockups now need to use the experiences and insights they’ve gained doing client-facing work to anticipate market trends and consumer preferences within the design community itself. To appeal to creatives shopping for mockups, many producers even go as far as designing entire fictional brands to help populate each release. The photos advertising Granada-based Bendito Mockup’s “Call My Barista” collection, for example, feature the same kind of retro brand mascots and bold typography one might expect to see for the identity of an actual, IRL coffee shop. Rather than a mockup being used to sell a piece of design, here the design is used to sell the mockup.

In theory, better quality mockups are used to woo better clients. In practice, they’re used just as often to signal status and insider knowledge to other creatives. Clients may tolerate remarkably basic or even subpar mockups so long as they fulfil the basic requirement of visualising a concept. Meanwhile, only the trained eye of a fellow designer or art director would likely appreciate that Mockup Maison’s new “Low Light” collection taps into the popular art direction trend of backlit silhouettes, or that Bendito’s “Peppinillo Social Club” set includes the same kind of silver dishware that’s been dominating brand photoshoots of late. Mockups have essentially become fetishised objects of obsession within the design community, where the use of an appropriately zeitgeisty mockup is part of a subliminal dialogue between designers (almost like a designer’s version of the business card scene in American Psycho). This kind of subtle peer-to-peer judgement isn’t so different from when designers talk shit about a rebrand that uses an overhyped typeface, even if the client and general public don’t care.

The benefits of mockups are perhaps most crucial for fresh graduates and early-career designers whose work is often speculative (we can require students to assemble a book on paper, but we can’t require them to produce the actual nose art for an aeroplane). Even those young designers who do have fully realised projects may not want these to make up the bulk of their portfolio anyway. Junior designers are usually relegated to production-oriented tasks that require more rule-following than they do creativity; as a result, the “real” projects these designers could put in their portfolio may not reflect their potential capabilities or personal interests.

The expectations we have for young designers entering the workforce have only gotten higher as the general talent pool becomes more competitive – students must present their work with enough polish to stand out amongst more seasoned designers who are job-hunting as a result of lay-offs or a change in career. Elaine Lopez, associate director of Parson’s undergraduate Communication Design department, emphasises the fleeting nature of portfolio reviews, noting that employers are typically looking at students’ websites for just a few seconds. “As a student, your job is to get a job,” she says, “and that means the work needs to seduce.” Elaine also mentions the potential that mockups hold to educate students on concepts like scale. Though we both agree that the best way to test the type size and colour of a print design is still to actually print it out (really!!!), putting your poster design into a billboard mockup can also be an accessible way to think about how something will look in the real world (though, as Raf Rennie said on X, “how many people have designed an actual billboard vs. the amount of billboard mockups there are?”). Elaine told me she even knows a few designers who create their work right into a mockup template in order to cut out the middleman and force themselves to consider final output as soon as possible.

But while mockups can elevate a piece of design, they often fail to serve high-concept work that’s rooted in process and research, which can be difficult to summarise visually. Conversely, simplistic or less innovative work can appear more compelling when neatly packaged within the standardised formats of online portfolios or print publications. Dependency on pre-fabricated mockup templates can also stifle the creation of formally unique work. For example, a book designed with unconventional dimensions or unusual binding is unlikely to fit neatly within an existing mockup, necessitating bespoke, time-intensive documentation. Some designers might consequently choose to conform their creations to the specifications of widely available mockups from the start instead.

The growth of virtual representations is part of a profound, almost philosophical shift in how we document and place value on design work. Historically, making a case study entailed capturing still images of tangible objects within the physical world. But as more companies operate primarily online, fewer actual objects exist to be documented in the first place. Design studios end up creating fake merchandise just to showcase parts of a brand system that didn’t make it beyond conceptual stages, or to paint a project as more far-reaching than it was in reality; an image is worth a thousand words and a brand only exists if it’s on a tote bag. Even purely digital creations, like websites, are frequently presented in mockups that simulate real-world interactions, like a laptop on a kitchen table or a phone in someone’s outstretched hand. Despite the value of these products lying in their digital manifestation, there remains an enduring perceived value in presenting them within tangible contexts. Of course, the shift towards showcasing digital products in real-life scenarios only reveals a deeper layer of semiotic complexity, given that these “IRL mockups” are themselves entirely virtual constructions.

In recent years, flatbed scanning has emerged as a foil to the boon of digital mockups – seeing a designed project documented via scanner seemed to be undeniable proof that an object was really produced. According to Elaine, “scanning is the most honest, it gets the realness of a thing, plus you don’t need to have any special knowledge about cameras or lighting to do it” (this combination of grit and ease might be the same reason brands have started using scanners to make ads, too). But nothing gold can stay: Bendito Mockup’s 2024 “Objets Trouvés” collection includes PSDs of just about every object you could ever want to include in a brand identity project – socks, ID cards, matches, T-shirts – pressed against glass. Despite the timeliness of the collection, co-founder Andrea Kaiser said her team wondered if people would buy a photoshop mockup of a scan when they can just scan something themselves so easily. But they had no reason to be worried: “It’s one of our best-selling collections,” she says.

The Objets Trouvés collection is the logical extreme of an industry whose focus has moved entirely towards creating digital simulacra – surfaces that merely allude to actual objects. We value the virtual representation of an object more than we do the object itself (Walter Benjamin would like a word!) You can see this phenomenon as well in the proliferation of brands executing brief, localised wildposting campaigns in cool New York neighbourhoods. While these might catch the eye of a handful of locals, the value of these print campaigns doesn’t seem to be in actually influencing potential customers who walk past. Instead, the value is the photo captured of the wild posting that can be posted to the brand’s Instagram (or, even more salient: the photos that influencers take in front of it); all the cachet of an IRL ad with the reach of a targeted digital one. This is part of a larger dissolution of placeness catalysed by mockups – you might see a case study from a design studio in New York for a brand in California that uses a mockup of a street scene in London. Though this might go unnoticed at a superficial level, the dissonance fundamentally disconnects the design from its intended environment. It does more than misplace physical geography; it disregards the cultural, social and economic contexts that influence how a design is perceived and interacted with by its audience – turning design into a globalised commodity where the specifics of place and context are glossed over in favour of a more universally palatable aesthetic.

Megan Bowker, an independent designer formerly at both Collins and Pentagram, likens the blurring between reality and representation that’s happening in the industry to a kind of fake news. “It’s lying by omission,” she says, “as long as the client thinks that you did the campaign, then you did the campaign.” Megan is a good person to ask about this; since 2018, a photograph of the back of her head – initially taken as part of a case study for a Collins rebrand of Ogilvy – has unwittingly become a staple in the mockup arsenals of designers and students worldwide. It’s easy to see why. The photo is stylistically quite chic, with a high flash, minimalist white walls and a great haircut. Most importantly: the actual design work made by Collins is also highly convenient to remove with content-aware fill. This trend toward devaluing copyrighted imagery reflects a broader indifference in the industry towards the integrity of image creation. Why bother with an original mockup when it’s simpler to repurpose someone else’s case study photo? In a design world saturated with moodboarding and copycats, the distinction often seems negligible.

The increasing popularity of AI-generated mockups (like all things involving AI) further muddies the waters. AI tools are capable of producing not just simple product mockups but entire faux environments. When designers lift a photo for their case study from a big studio’s website, at least the original photographer or CG artist was compensated for the initial usage. AI, on the other hand, only further alienates the work of actual human talent at any point in the process, thereby pushing the industry towards an even greater reliance on digital creations without tangible origin.

I sometimes joke that one of the big things art school taught me was how to effectively bullshit my way through a critique, even when I knew the work I turned in wasn’t very good. I wonder if mockups are teaching designers a bit of the same thing; that “winning” in the industry is more about mastering the art of image manipulation and presentation than about the substantive application of design principles in the real world. We’ve made a contest out of who can best skillfully repurpose existing visuals to suit new narratives – but losing real objects and real people costs us. If a designer has only ever transferred a business card design from Illustrator to Photoshop, they may never realise that the YK blue they picked won’t work in a small run of digitally printed stationery. Plus, if they never produce those cards, they may miss the chance to connect with the printer who will become their secret weapon. It’s often these unplanned interactions that provide the most enduring lessons and, by proxy, long-term career success and creative fulfilment.

Students often ask me how I broke into art direction. I often give a convoluted, somewhat jokey, response about spending too much time on Pinterest and Are.na. But a more honest answer is that it started when I asked a friend to help me take some pictures of my degree project.