How to Quickly Mockup any Design in Illustrator

Illustrator Mockups

Mockups are an excellent way to show your clients how your designs will look in real life, and there are many mockups available for use in Photoshop, like the ones you can find at Medialoot. However, with the latest improvements in design tools, mockups can now also be made in Illustrator (though with fewer features than Photoshop), and working with them is easier than you might think. You just need a mockup image and your design. Today, I will show you how to apply any design to any mockup image you want in Illustrator with a process that takes less than five minutes, and how you can change the whole design or just a few colors even after the mockup is made.

Step 1

Open the base image you want to use as a mockup in Illustrator. In this case, I will use a white t-shirt, but feel free to use any other image you want, could be a smartphone, a billboard or even a coffee cup.

Step 2

Place your design into the document, it could be any kind of graphic or text that you want, but in this case I will use the Medialoot logo in a vector format.

Step 3

Go to Select > All.

Step 4

Go to Object > Mockup > Make. At this point, Illustrator will use AI to process the image and give you an almost finished version of your graphic applied into the object you choosed for your mockup.

Step 5

Position your graphic anywhere you want it.

Step 6

If, like in this case, the graphic is a bit bigger than you want it, simply hold the Shift key on your keyboard and drag any of the anchor points until your graphic is at the size you want it.

Step 7

With your graphic selected, go to Window > Transparency. Set the blending mode that best works in your case and reduce the Opacity if needed. Here I will set my blending mode to "Color Burn" just because i want a very strong light over the logo and reduce the opacity a bit.

Step 8

If you are using a vector graphic, you can edit it even after being applied to the mockup. To do that, double click over the graphic to enter Isolation Mode, edit your graphic as you wish, and then simply double click anywhere outside the artboard.

Some Final Words:

Now that you know how easily you can mockup a design over a simple t-shirt, use any other object (like electronics, signs, textiles, boxes, etc) and follow this same procedure with any other graphic or image that you want to create your mockups in a record time like in the following example.