When you hear the word ‘mockup’, it usually refers to a lo-fi website/app layouts. Today I want to talk about another type of mockup, product mockups. These are the mockups you might make to ‘show the product in action’. Typically they take your site, template, theme or mobile app and show it off by setting it into a laptop, a desktop, phone, tablet or even smartwatch setting. They are part aspiration – part demonstration.
Of course, you can create these images from scratch in Photoshop or Sketch – in fact, there are plenty of excellent Photoshop actions and Sketch extensions that will layer your artwork into a preset image.
However, if you’re generating more than one or two, you’ll probably want some variety in your imagery. Today I’ve collected five specialist mockup generators designed to showcase your future products.
SmartMockups is a standalone app available for both OSX and Win7+ for a one-off payment of $49. I must admit, I was curious about this payment model. What use is an iPhone 6 mockup in 2 years? However, SmartMockups promises free lifetime updates.
Of course, there’s not much you can do if they decide to discontinue the app tomorrow.
Nevertheless, SmartMockups is a rich and impressive application with a much broader range of uses than any of its competitors (in fact, we featured it in our Incredible Design Tools and Resources, August 2017 article on Tuesday!). Apart from the expected digital device templates, SmartMockups offers billboards, posters, business cards and even apparel template designs. This is a versatile unit.
Mockuuups Studio is a desktop app available for Windows 7+ and MacOS offering a nice selection of original base photos.
Once you’re up and running, you can drag any JPG, PSD or Sketch file into the app window and see it displayed in over 260 product shots. These include phones and tablets – in both portrait and landscape modes – along with laptops and even smartwatches. Impressively, there’s a nice selection of Google, HTC, Samsung and Dell devices along with the predictable Apple product shots.
Mockuuups Studio offers a nice set of controls that let you filter the photo pool by device type, orientation, and even by the gender of the hands holding the device.
The app is free to download and install and offers 24 free product shots to use. For $5 per month you can remove the watermarks from the other 243 shots (though there was a discounted to $3.50 when I checked).
Dunnnk is another super simple online mockup generator currently offering almost 60 base templates across six device categories – iPhone, Android, MacBook, iPad, iMac, and Apple Watch. Two things make it noteworthy.
Firstly, the imagery appears to be all original (I didn’t see it anywhere else) and shares a cohesive look and feel. They’re even clever enough to blur your uploaded screenshot to match the focal length of the underlying image. Secondly, Dunnnk has an unusually large selection of Apple Watch image templates (if you need should ever need those).
The images that you generate live in-page are high-quality and free to download. You also have the option to buy and keep layered PSD files of some templates for between $5 or $10.
Dimmy.Club is another web-based option. Though it only offers 12 devices, it is the only option in this list that lets you select multiple color options for your device. It’s relatively Apple-centric, though offers a Google Pixel and a random Nokia.
I think it’s most notable for the plain, stripped-back product shots it produces, which may well turn out to be more versatile than any of the others presented here. And if that’s still not visually simple enough for each, each template is also offered in a lo-fi ‘vector blueprint’ view.
Magic Mockups is a simple web-based product mockup generator offering laptop, phone, tablet and iMac images.
The service currently offers approximately 25 base images that seem to be curated from a range of free image sites – Unsplash and Layerform – so you’ll see these images elsewhere. While the images may not be exclusive, Magic Mockups is free and simple to use.
Though each of the apps listed above have a case to mount, I think Mockuuups Studio is a good place to start. It requires no install, gets you started with some good free options, but allows you to buy more variety for a reasonable fee.
If budget is big driver in your decision, Dunnnk has a wide range of no-cost options – assuming you don’t need the PSD format.