The Role of Mockups in Placemaking and Geographic Representation

Design mockups have long been a staple for communicating ideas to clients – turning flat graphics into scenes that feel tangible and real. But beyond their practical utility, mockups can also act as placemaking tools. By placing a design into a specific geographic context – say, on a New York City street corner or a Tokyo subway platform – designers aren’t just showing how something looks, but where and with whom it belongs.

Geographic mockups, especially those modeled after, photographed, and emulating particular cities or urban aesthetics, function not only as visual aids but as cultural representations. Examples like Mockup.Maison’s city-themed bundles (named for places like New York, Los Angeles, Basel, and so on) and others, looking at how they help localize projects visually while potentially reinforcing tropes.

From gritty alleyway posters to sleek café app previews, these staged scenes shape assumptions about usage and users. In this article, I’ll also consider the ethics of representation, diversity, and bias in these digital staging tools. The goal is a critical, nuanced view on the power of mockups to make a place feel “real,” and the responsibility that comes with framing design in such a specific space.

The City as a Stage: Mockups as Visual Placemaking

Mockups have always been about bringing designs to life in context. A well-chosen mockup can make an abstract logo or interface tangible by showing it in situ – on a storefront, a billboard, a phone in someone’s hand. Geographic-themed mockups take this a step further by providing a sense of place. They treat the city or location as a kind of stage set for the design. The approach is akin to architectural placemaking, but in a graphic sense: the environment around the design conveys mood, culture, and story.

City-themed mockup bundles have surged in popularity, offering curated scenes from specific locales. Take Mockup.Maison, a studio known for high-quality photographic mockups with a “touch of Swiss design.” They release their mockups in carefully curated collections shot in city, everyday, or studio settings. In the city category, many collections are simply named after places: New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo, Basel, and more. Each bundle is essentially a visual homage to the city’s aesthetic. For instance, Mockup.Maison’s New York series spans multiple sets (“New Yorkers,” “New York Basics,” “NYC 2,” “NYC 3,” etc.), indicating just how rich and varied a single city’s settings can be. Likewise, there are packs for Los Angeles (sunny SoCal vibes), Basel (sleek Swiss urban scenes), Singapore, San Francisco, Rome, Zurich, London, and beyond

This trend isn’t limited to one provider; other mockup sources also highlight place-specific collections – e.g. Mocu Design’s offerings like “Buy New York Mockups” or “Buy London Mockups” in their catalog. And among these mockup providers, the message is clear: designers crave authentic backdrops, not generic ones, and what’s more authentic than a real city street? (Plus those awesome wear and tear marks, or the dramatic evening shadows).

From a client-communication perspective, these geographic mockups are invaluable. By visually transporting stakeholders into familiar urban scenes, designers add realism and context to their presentations. As one mockup provider describes, “Urban mockups provide realism unmatched by generic backdrops”, allowing clients to “experience designs from precise real-world perspectives” [mocu.city].

A branding concept shown on a Times Square billboard or a SoHo storefront immediately gains a sense of scale and legitimacy. Clients can judge a design’s visibility in the clutter of a real street and even give localized feedback (e.g. “Would this color stand out in Tokyo’s neon glow versus on a historic Parisian wall?”). The realism of context also helps streamline decision-making. It’s easier to say “yes, this works” or “no, it needs adjustment” when you see the design in place, rather than floating an Illustrator board, or lost in a Figma file. In short, place-specific mockups help bridge the gap between an idea and its real-world application, anchoring design concepts in environments that stakeholders can relate to.

Localizing Design: When City Aesthetics Tell a Story

One powerful aspect of geographic mockups is how they enable visual localization. Designers might use these tools to make a project feel at home in a certain culture or market. Instead of a one-size-fits-all presentation, a team might show a campaign in context for each key region – perhaps a tech ad displayed on a sleek Tokyo metro digital screen for the Japanese market, versus the same ad on a gritty Brooklyn brick wall poster for a U.S. urban audience. The content might be identical, but the backdrop tunes the message to a locale. This practice acknowledges that design is not viewed in a vacuum; the surroundings influence how a viewer perceives it.

Mockups as placemaking let designers tell more nuanced stories. They can signal target demographics and brand positioning through setting. A billboard in Times Square shouts global ambition and scale, while a mural in a hip Berlin neighborhood whispers cool, indie credibility. As a guide on outdoor advertising notes, even within one city like New York, the location of your billboard can target specific demographics – high-traffic tourist hubs vs. niche neighborhoods reach different people [mockuuups.studio]. By extension, the choice of mockup environment in a presentation is almost like casting a character for your design: it says this is the world where this brand lives.

Localized Design Insights with Mockups

Crucially, using city-themed mockups can also spark practical design insights. Environmental and experiential graphic designers have long conducted on-site evaluations – checking how a sign reads from across a plaza, or how a poster looks in the subway. High-quality mockups simulate this early on in the design process. They allow testing of scale, contrast, and legibility in context.

If a poster design is dropped into a busy urban streetscape via Photoshop, you might quickly realize the text is too small to be seen by a pedestrian across the street – prompting a revision before anything is actually printed. The mockups helps to localize and improve the design within the design process.

As one case study suggests, seeing a design in an authentic city context lets designers refine details like typography and hierarchy for real-world conditions [mocu.city]. In this way, mockups double as design research tools. They provide a low-cost, imaginative form of prototyping how a design interacts with architectural space, lighting, and other environmental factors, all before committing to production.

City Bundle Aesthetics: Authenticity or Stereotype?

With great realism, however, comes great representation. The curated aesthetics of city-themed mockups can quickly slip into stereotypes if not handled thoughtfully. Every city has its clichés, and in packaging a visual “essence” of a place, mockup creators might lean heavily on those tropes. The result can be a double-edged sword: instantly recognizable imagery that also risks caricature.

A city-themed mockup collection (New York) that uses iconic street details – from graffiti and subway grates to yellow taxis and pizza slices – to evoke a gritty NYC atmosphere. Such scenes help a design feel at home in “the Big Apple,” but they can also slide into stereotyping of urban life.

Consider Mockup.Maison’s “New Yorkers Collection,” which showcases designs against backdrops of New York City. As the collage above suggests, the vibe is deliberately gritty-cool: brick walls plastered with graffiti, buzzing street corners with yellow cabs, and even the token giant pizza slice prop for that New York pizzeria feel.

On one hand, it’s fantastic for a designer who wants to say, “this poster fits in the real NYC streetscape.” The colors, textures, and lighting are true to life. On the other hand, one might ask: is all of NYC defined by graffiti, pigeons, and jumping turnstiles? Of course not. Yet a bundle that leans exclusively into the “grungy” side of New York could perpetuate a one-note image of the city. It reinforces the enduring trope of New York as a rough, graffiti-splashed metropolis even if the city contains multitudes (gleaming corporate Midtown, leafy upscale Brooklyn blocks, etc.).

This isn’t to single out one product – many design asset creators do similar things. A hypothetical “Los Angeles” mockup set might focus on palm trees, vintage cars, and beachy sunset light, nodding to the city’s laid-back glamour while perhaps ignoring its dense downtown or diverse neighborhoods. A Tokyo bundle might show neon-soaked alleyways and crowded crosswalks but not, say, a quiet residential street or traditional temple area.

By selectively amplifying certain motifs, these mockups create a stylized and stereotyped version of place. It’s akin to how movies use establishing shots: Paris gets the Eiffel Tower, Rio de Janeiro gets Christ the Redeemer, Chicago get’s the lakefront (or some crime corner). The design consequence is that any project shown in these mockups inherits the stereotype – which might be perfectly fine if that’s the intent (e.g. a campaign deliberately embracing NYC’s street art culture), but problematic if it unintentionally labels the design with attributes the client didn’t intend.

There is a fine line between capturing a locale’s spirit and cliché. The best mockup studios strive for authenticity in their photography – real locations, real lighting, not over-stylized.

Still, even authentic photos reflect choices of what to show. It’s worth noting that Mockup.Maison’s catalog, for instance, also has a “Basel Collection” (named after the Swiss city renowned in the design world). In that series, the preview images show clean modernist architecture, neat streets, and posters displayed in well-kept public spaces. It’s also notably devoid of people or degradation. The tone is markedly different from the New Yorker set: calmer, orderly, with an emphasis on grid-aligned presentations (fitting for the land of Swiss Design).

Each collection, then, is a point of view on a place.

As designers using these tools, we should be aware of the narrative we’re implicitly buying into. Are we leveraging genuine local context, or are we falling back on an easy visual stereotype? And what happens when we continue to propagate such tropes?

Context is Persona: What Environment Says About Users

Geographic mockups don’t only influence how a place is perceived – they also shape assumptions about the product or audience in the design. In user interface (UI) and product design showcases, it’s now common to use lifestyle mockups: images of a phone or laptop in a person’s hand, or sitting on a table in some environment. These often implicitly answer the question: “Who is using this app, and where?” The backdrop becomes a proxy persona.

If you consistently present a mobile app design on a Tokyo subway mockup – a phone being used amid a sea of commuters, perhaps with Japanese signage in the background – you’re signaling that this app is for busy urbanites, tech-savvy and on-the-go (and maybe that it’s literally targeted at the Japanese market or big Asian cities).

By contrast, showing the same app on an iPhone mockup held by someone lounging in a Boise café (latte art on the table, exposed brick wall looking out at a mountain view) implies a different user story: maybe a creative professional or student in a trendy, comfortable setting, using the app for leisure or freelance work.

Neither scenario is neutral.

For product teams and our non-visualizing clients, these cues can be incredibly helpful. They localize the use-case: an e-reader app shown on a phone in a quiet park setting versus on a crowded bus tells very different stories about when and how one might read. Lifestyle mockup bundles often have names like “Digital Nomad Pack” or “Café Life Bundle,” explicitly packaging a set of assumptions. A “Tokyo Transit” pack might include not just the environment but also suggest a fast pace, possibly usage at night (implying dark mode UI might be appreciated!). Meanwhile, a “Scandinavian Home Office” mockup (just imagining one) could feature minimal decor, daylight – suggesting calm, slow-paced usage, maybe during remote work days.

The power to frame space is the power to frame perception.

Designers must be careful not to inadvertently exclude or alienate audiences through these choices. If all your product’s mockups show young hip urban folks in coffee shops, what message does that send to an older or rural user who might also benefit from your app? They could subconsciously feel, “This isn’t really for me.” Similarly, if a service is shown only in a Western city context, stakeholders from other regions might wonder if the solution is truly meant to address their context. In an era where products are global, using too narrow a depiction of usage can be a misstep. Smart teams therefore vary the environmental context to speak to a diverse user base – much like how advertising campaigns roll out different imagery for different markets.

Ethics and Bias in Digital Staging

Because mockups function as a form of visual storytelling, there’s an ethical dimension to how we depict people and places. We’ve touched on geographic stereotypes; equally important is the matter of who appears (or is implied) in these scenes. Many mockups, especially device and lifestyle ones, include partial views of people – a hand holding a phone, a figure walking past a sign, a silhouetted crowd around a billboard. These human elements inject life and relatability, but they also raise representation questions. Are we showing diverse genders, ethnicities, body types, and abilities? Or are the “users” in our staged scenarios always young, able-bodied, and of one dominant demographic?

The world of stock imagery, has a well-documented diversity problem. “A huge number of the models are white, young, thin, and not visibly disabled,” Madeleine Vasaly notes, pointing out that many stock photos end up being pretty stereotypical [madeleinevasaly.com]. The same can easily carry over to mockups.

If every hand in the photo mockups is manicured and light-skinned, that’s a very narrow representation of users. If every street scene is in a North American or European city, what biases are we reinforcing about where “good design” lives or what a “modern user” looks like?

Visual stereotype and bias have subtle but real impacts. Communications scholar Paul Frosh, analyzing commercial photography, observed that stock images (ubiquitous in design and marketing) “reflect, construct and reinforce cultural stereotypes” disegnojournal.com. They become part of the “wallpaper of consumer culture” that shapes how we see the world. (Additionally, imagine how this worsens under the bent of AI image generation tools. A subject for another writing.)

Now, mockups are a specific niche of imagery, but as they become omnipresent in design presentations, they too contribute to this enveloping visual environment. If designers only ever use the same city tropes – the gritty New York alley, the Silicon Valley open office, the picturesque European cafe – those images start to solidify in our collective mind as the default backdrop for certain designs or brands. And if those defaults sideline other experiences (rural life, developing-world cities, ordinary suburbia, etc.), we risk a form of design myopia.

Representation Ethics in Mockups

Representation ethics in mockups calls for a more thoughtful approach. This can mean actively seeking out more inclusive mockup assets – for example, using image sources that feature underrepresented groups or non-stereotypical settings. Some resources have emerged to fill this need (e.g. stock libraries devoted to diversity, like Nappy which provides high-res photos of Black and brown people in everyday scenarios https://nappy.co).

There’s also the question of cultural appropriation – using a locale’s recognizable elements as a prop without sensitivity. For instance, plopping your product into a night market in Bangkok or against a Marrakesh souk scene might look exotic and cool to someone outside those scenes, but it should be done with respect and understanding of those contexts, ideally with feedback from someone familiar with them.

In short, as stage designers of a brand’s little theater, designers must consider the ethics of their set design.

The goal isn’t to avoid using context – on the contrary, context is hugely important – but to use it aware of the narratives we’re amplifying or muting.

A context-aware mockup isn’t just one that matches a city’s aesthetic; it’s one that does so truthfully and respectfully, enhancing the story without reducing it to a caricature.

Toward Thoughtful, Context-Aware Mockups

Recognizing both the power and pitfalls of geographic mockups, how can designers and mockup creators strike the right balance? One aid is to remember that the design is the protagonist, and the mockup’s role is to support that story – not steal the spotlight.

Mockup studios that are mindful of context tend to emphasize this point. As I try to put it, “It’s not about the mockups; it’s about making your work shine.” linkedin.com This philosophy is important: the place we choose for a presentation should amplify the design concept’s intended message, not distract or derail it. If a certain background, city, or scenario doesn’t add meaning, it might be extraneous fluff.

Another practical approach is to be strategic and selective with mockups. Rather than dropping a logo onto every imaginable surface in a dozen cities (which can dilute the narrative medium.com), a thoughtful presentation might include just a few contexts that really matter.

For example, if you’re designing a new boutique hotel brand, you might pick two key scenes: a nighttime exterior shot of the hotel signage (to show the sense of place and elegance), and a close-up of branded items in a guest’s hands in the lobby (to show intimate user experience). Those specific contexts, if well-chosen and photographed, do more storytelling work than ten random, floating-in-space UI mockups would. They also force us to consider which environment best communicates the core idea. Is this brand about urban hustle, coastal relaxation, or high-tech innovation? Find a scene that speaks to that.

When using city-themed mockups, it can help to mix and customize. If the New York pack has a bit too much grunge for your taste, perhaps supplement it with a cleaner city scene from elsewhere to avoid one-note messaging. Or if you notice all your device mockup images feature the same type of person, consciously include another that features a different look (there are mockups out there with diverse hands and settings if you search).

Ultimately, mockups as placemaking tools are about imagination meeting reality. They have the remarkable ability to transport a viewer – to make someone feel, “Wow, I can picture this design in the world.” That is a persuasive, almost magical, quality in design communication. Our responsibility as designers is to wield that magic with care. We need to be narrators who don’t just pick scenes for their visual punch or stereotypical amplification, but for their truthfulness to the story we want to tell and the audiences we care about.

All that to say, geographic mockups and city-themed visual environments are a double-edged sword: they improve client understanding and buy-in by rooting designs in relatable places, and they let us explore the interplay between design and culture—each with the danger of narrative oversight. Used thoughtfully, they can enhance localization, emotional resonance, and functional testing of designs in context. But we must stay vigilant about the narratives we perpetuate. The city streets in our presentations should be backdrops – rich with character yet never overshadowing the characters (is that a typography pun?).

If we can do that – marry authenticity with creativity – then mockups really become more than pretty pictures; they become a form of visual placemaking that honors both the design and the place it’s meant to live. In the end, a mockup shouldn’t just show a design – it should speak to a sense of place, inviting viewers to imagine a world where that design genuinely belongs.

Some References and more Reading:

• Giammaria, Alessandro. “The Art of Mockups in Design: When Less is More.” Medium, 2024. (cited in medium.com)
• Mocu Design. “Leveraging Urban Mockups for Impactful Client Presentations.” Mocu.city Blog, 2025mocu.city.
• Mockup.Maison – Collections pagemockup.maison.
• Frosh, Paul. “Is Commercial Photography a Public Evil?” (as cited in Disegno Journal article “Stock Creep”)disegnojournal.com.
• Vasaly, Madeleine. “Free Sources for Inclusive and Stereotype-Busting Stock Images.” madeleinevasaly.com, 2023madeleinevasaly.com.
• Mockuuups Studio. “10+ New York City Billboard Mockups [Free & Paid].” Mockuuups Blog, 2025mockuuups.studio.
• Ostendo.Graphics – “Why Mockup Restraint Elevates Storytelling: The Art of Design Presentation.” Medium, 2025medium.com.