Why Mockup Restraint Elevates Storytelling: The Art of Design Presentation

In the world of brand and graphic design, mockup images have become nearly as ubiquitous as the designs themselves. Browse any agency portfolio or Behance page and you’ll find logos strewn across glossy signage, posters held by models, and identities applied to everything from coffee cups to safety cones (guilty). These in situ images can bring design to life – helping clients imagine a new brand in the real world – but there’s a growing chorus of experienced designers warning against overindulgence. 

Alessandro Giammaria, in his 2024 essay “The Art of Mockups in Design: When Less is More,” laments how many projects are now “buried under an avalanche of mockups” where “the true protagonist — the design itself — gets lost among thousands of scenic visualizations” agiammaria.medium.com. Giammaria argues that while mockups are vital tools to contextualize and sell a design, overusing them can dilute the impact of the work.

This article expands on Giammaria’s article and explores how and why restraint in mockup use enhances clarity, storytelling, and conceptual coherence in design documentation. I’ll affirm Giammaria’s key points and extend the discussion with perspectives from iconic design practitioners (like the partners of Pentagram and Michael Bierut’s reflections in How To), insights from mockup providers (Mockup Maison, LS Graphics, Bendito Mockups, and yours truly: Ostendo.Graphics), and critical commentary on our current “mockup culture.” The goal is to provide a deep dive on using mockups wisely – a high-level reflection on design authorship, message clarity, the designer-client relationship, and the performative vs. authentic roles of mockups in pitches.

In essence: 

How do we ensure the design remains hero and the mockup a supporting actor?

(ie, imagine a beautifully art-directed photograph of a single logo on a storefront – one strong image telling a story, rather than a dozen superficial logo stamps on every object in sight.)

Mockups: Powerful Tools with a Potential Trap

Mockups have risen to prominence because they solve a real problem in design communication. As Giammaria notes, “Mockups were born as a tool to bring projects to life, to help clients visualize how their brand will exist in the real world” agiammaria.medium.com. In client presentations and case studies, a well-chosen mockup can make an abstract logo tangible – suddenly, that flat logo is seen on a shop sign, a business card, or a mobile app, and the client’s eyes light up. Mockups serve multiple valuable roles:

• Brand Contextualization: Mockups show how a design adapts to different contexts and validate that it works in real scenarios. By bridging the gap between an abstract concept and its practical application, mockups help confirm the design’s versatility.

• Client Communication: A mockup “makes the intangible tangible,” helping non-designers understand the design’s impact [agiammaria.medium.com]. Clients can better visualize the return on investment when they see a logo on a product or a poster in an environment – it turns imagination into something concrete.

• Professional Presentation: Polished mockups add a layer of refinement to presentations, showing attention to detail and creating an engaging experience. A sleek, realistic mockup implies “this design is real and ready”, boosting credibility of the designer and their work.

In these ways, mockups really do work – when used judiciously. Giammaria affirms that a handful of excellent, contextually relevant mockups can “create a bridge between abstract concept and practical application” and “facilitate project understanding” without issue.

Leading design firms understand this well. Pentagram, for example, often showcases new brand identities with just a few key applications: a signage system in the environment, a sample poster or digital screen, maybe a piece of stationery – each chosen to tell part of the brand’s story. Such case study presentations feel purposeful rather than gratuitous. They follow the principle that design is about storytelling and every image should advance the narrative. (They also have the clients, budget, applications, and team to support real documentation of their work so might only need mockups in the fictitious 'presentation' phase of work.)

The trap, however, is when quantity overtakes quality. Giammaria observes that many designers have fallen into a “mockup trap” – populating their documentation with so many glossy mockup scenes that the design itself is upstaged.

“When mockups become too many, the original design risks getting lost. It’s as if the frame becomes more important than the painting itself.” 

Being trained as an artist, I love this analogy: the frame (the context, the surrounding scene) should enhance the painting (the design), not devour it. Each extra mockup is another frame vying for attention, and “the more we add, the more we dilute the impact of our main message” [agiammaria.medium.com].

The result can be a kind of visual noise – impressive at first glance, but ultimately obscuring what exactly the viewer is supposed to remember.

There’s even an element of credibility at stake. If every presentation is filled with dramatic lens flares, models, and cinematic lighting, savvy clients might wonder if the design only looks good in make-believe scenarios.

(One is reminded of the tongue-in-cheek question posed by writer Lucy Bourton: “When has anyone, ever, in real life, promoted an event or exhibition by holding up a poster?” [uxdesign.cc]. It highlights how some mockup tropes – like that ubiquitous shot of hands gripping a poster – are pure fantasy, never occurring outside designers’ portfolios. And yet, ya'll can't get enough.) 

The point is not that realism is mandatory, but that authenticity and relevance matter. Mockups should help clients envision their world, not a contrived parallel universe.

Giammaria’s call is for a return to balance. His conclusion is a mantra worth repeating:

 “Mockups are a tool, not the end goal. Our objective as designers is to communicate an identity, tell a story, solve a problem. Mockups should support this mission, not distract from it.”agiammaria.medium.com

In other words, the design’s story and problem-solving purpose must remain front and center. Every mockup we include should add value to that story – and if it doesn’t, perhaps leaving it out will make our presentation stronger.

Clarity of Message: Less is More

Restraint in mockup use directly correlates with clarity. Clarity of message is a core tenet of good design; the same applies to design documentation. A senior designer reviewing a branding presentation should be able to ask: What is the one big idea here? What do I want the client or stakeholder to remember? If the answer is the new logo and its core concept, then everything in the presentation should serve to illuminate that concept. Too many disparate mockups can muddy those waters.

As Giammaria argues, “Each additional mockup divides the viewer’s attention” [agiammaria.medium.com]. When a brand identity is shown on twenty different mockup images – ranging from truck wraps to app icons to T-shirts to event badges – the viewer’s eye and mind keep bouncing around. They might be impressed by the breadth, but are they clearer on the essence of the design? Often not. The risk is that the design’s core idea gets lost in a sea of applications.

Again (let's beat this horse dead), Pentagram’s work is often praised for its clarity – “distill(ing) complex ideas into simple, memorable designs” phable.io. When Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and team redesigned the MasterCard logo a few years ago, they famously “stripped away unnecessary elements” and reduced the mark to its most recognizable form. The result was a design that was versatile and timeless – because it was clear and uncluttered.

The same philosophy can be applied to presenting that logo: rather than drowning it in visual effects, the designers let the simple interlocking circles speak for themselves in just a couple of contexts (a payment card mockup, a digital app icon) that emphasize how well the pared-down logo works. In presentations, as in design itself, less is often more.

Restraint Shows Confidence.

If a design idea is truly strong, a few well-chosen exposures of it will be enough to communicate its strength. In fact, many veteran designers intentionally present initial designs in a very stripped-down manner to ensure the idea shines without ornament. For instance, it’s not uncommon for identity designers to first show a logo in black-and-white on a plain background – no fancy 3D signage or dramatic lighting – to test, “Does the form and concept hold up on its own?” Only after getting buy-in on the core design will they reveal a limited set of applications to demonstrate utility.

One way to achieve this clarity is by viewing mockups as illustrative evidence rather than decoration. Each image needs a reason to exist. For example, imagine you’re presenting a new visual identity for a boutique hotel. Perhaps your key message is that the brand feels elegant and welcoming. You might include two contexts: a photo-realistic mockup of the hotel’s exterior signage at dusk (to convey elegance in a real architectural setting), and a well-composed shot of the hotel’s stationery or keycard (to show the welcoming touch in guest experience materials). Those two images, if thoughtfully art-directed, can speak volumes. They focus on the environments that matter most to the hotel brand story.

In contrast, adding five more mockups – a staff t-shirt, a mug, a billboard, a van wrap, a smartphone app – could actually dilute the narrative unless those are truly critical touchpoints for this hotel. Clarity is about paring down to what counts. The viewer isn’t distracted by extraneous imagery; they see the sign, the card, and they grasp the intended vibe immediately. Every added image would introduce a new mini-story (“the hotel also has a mobile app!” “the hotel also advertises on highway billboards!”) and unless those subplots reinforce the main narrative, they simply create clutter.

Embracing “less is more” with mockups leads to a cleaner, more focused story. It forces us as designers to decide what we really want to say. It echoes the wisdom of editing in other creative fields – just as great writers cut out fluff to sharpen their point, great design communicators trim their presentations to amplify the signal over the noise. By showing restraint, we respect the audience’s attention and guide it to what truly matters in the design.

Storytelling and Narrative Coherence

I can admit, however, that design is also about storytelling – conveying the ethos of a brand or the solution to a problem through visual means. In this regard, mockups should be seen as story beats in the narrative of a design, not as a checklist of every possible use case.

Giammaria underscores this by suggesting each mockup be chosen strategically: “Each mockup should reflect the brand positioning, show a unique aspect of the project, and serve a specific purpose in the narrative.” [agiammaria.medium.com].

In other words, think of the mockups in your presentation as scenes in a film (hello, short videos): each scene should move the plot forward or reveal something important. If it doesn’t, it could be cut in the editing room.

Maintain a Conceptual Through-line

A coherent narrative through mockups also means maintaining a conceptual through-line. A common mistake when assembling many mockups is that the presentation starts to feel scattershot – a cool 3D sign here, a textured business card there, a novelty tote bag elsewhere – without a unifying thread except that they all carry the logo.

By contrast, a restrained approach can reinforce a concept. Suppose your design concept for a brand is all about “modern simplicity.” You might intentionally choose mockup environments that are themselves minimal and modern: say, a clean gallery-like wall for a poster, or a simple desk layout for a letterhead. You’d avoid throwing that logo onto a busy textured background or in a whimsical scene, because it breaks the coherence of the story.

(Opposite this, if you're creating design work for a bustling cityscape, putting your work in the middle of the chaos to illustrate its clarity and effectiveness may serve to appropriately juxtapose and separate your work from the noise.)

This is where art-directed mockups come in – not just using any template, but selecting or creating scenes that complement the design’s tone and concept. It’s much like setting the stage for a play in a way that enhances the script’s mood. Many mockup providers recognize this need for curation; for instance, Mockup Maison prides itself on “contemporary high-quality PSD mockups with a touch of Swiss design… Real photography – real shadows”, providing semi-neutral scenes that elevate a design (if occasionally overshadowing it. Their motto of putting “you and your work into the proper spotlight” [mockup.maison] suggests a focus on showcasing the work with appropriate context in a high-production light.

Design Authorship, Original Works, and Mockup Templates

One intriguing aspect of narrative coherence is how design authorship plays a role. There’s an ongoing conversation about designers relying on ready-made mockup templates versus creating their own bespoke imagery. Using ubiquitous mockups (like the famous hands holding a poster, or the same MacBook render everyone uses) can make a portfolio feel generic. Some designers have turned this on its head by making the presentation style part of their signature style – effectively asserting authorship over the mockup process.

An example noted in Bourton’s “Your design here” essay is Studio Feixen’s use of the bulldog clip to display posters: what began as a pragmatic way to show scale became an aesthetic choice that the studio adopted consistently, to the point where the method of presentation became part of their identity [itsnicethat.com]. In that case, the mockup style reinforced the studio’s narrative (control and modernist clarity, in Feixen’s case).

However, not every project needs such a stylistic imprint on its documentation. The key is that the way you show the work should align with the work itself. If the brand is luxurious and subdued, maybe your mockups use subdued lighting and real materials to match that story. If the brand is youthful and digital-first, maybe your only mockups are screen-based and interactive-feeling. This alignment creates a more convincing, immersive narrative for the client or reviewer.

Giammaria’s advice essentially boils down to treating mockups as supporting actors in your story. They should each have a defined role: one might demonstrate scale, another functionality, and another the emotional impact. He advocates for selecting “only the most strategic touchpoints for the brand” – better to have “three mockups perfectly aligned with the brand positioning than twenty generic ones.” [agiammaria.medium.com].

This curatorial mindset ensures the overall documentation tells a cohesive story from start to finish. A viewer could glance through your presentation and understand the concept, the tone, and the key applications without feeling lost or distracted. By exercising restraint, you create a storyline that is tight, memorable, and persuasive.

Trust, Authenticity, and the Designer–Client Relationship

When presenting design work to clients (or any stakeholders), there’s a delicate balance between impressing them and earning their trust in the solution. Mockups, used wisely, can do both – but used excessively or frivolously, they might actually erode trust. A client might think, “This looks amazing in the fancy presentation, but will it hold up in reality?” As designers, one of our responsibilities is to communicate honestly about how a design works. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show polished visions of the ideal implementation – we should – but we also must make sure we’re not overselling or misrepresenting the design with hard-flash, over-ambitious antics.

Relaying Design, Mockups Aside

Another consideration is the client’s ability to relay the design to others. Often, the people in the room with you will need to champion the design internally – to their CEO, their board, their marketing teams – when you’re not there. If your documentation is overstuffed with flashy mockups but lacks clear explanation, the client may struggle to remember or articulate the rationale.

As one commentator on Pentagram’s process puts it, it’s wise to “ensure your design decisions are conveyed properly, in case your client has to present your work to their boss, without you being present.”

In practical terms, this means the story and reasoning should be evident in the presentation itself, not just in the designer’s spoken narration. A moderate number of well-chosen mockups, each labeled or introduced with why it’s important, will serve the client better than a mountain of images with no context. For example, a client can take a lean brand guidelines document that shows the logo, color palette, and two usage examples and easily share it around. Compare that to instead having a 50-page mockup extravaganza, the core message might get lost on the rest of their team.

Clarity builds trust – the client trusts that the designer is solving their problem, not just putting on a show.

Scaling Mockups to Your Client, Not Your Ego.

Authenticity is another dimension here. Clients respond well when they feel the designer understands their reality. If you present a tiny nonprofit organization’s new logo by showing it on Times Square billboards and private jets, they’ll likely chuckle – it’s just not their world. It may even come off as out of touch. A few well-targeted mockups (say, a community poster on a local bulletin board, a social media post, a T-shirt for volunteers) would both flatter and reassure the client that you “get” them.

As design strategist Natasha Jen once pointed out in a critique of overhyped design processes, we must not let glossy presentation “mask the lack of substance” – instead, substance (the design concept solving the client’s problem) should drive the presentation.

Lastly, being honest about the role of mockups can itself be a trust-building moment. You might notice at Ostendo.Graphics I highlight a tongue-in-cheek insight in those fancy ticker-tape banners: “Don’t tag us in your documentation @Ostendo.Graphics. No one wants to admit they used a mockup.” [ostendo.graphics]. This line encapsulates a truth: the best mockups are so seamless that they feel real, and designers often prefer to keep the illusion of reality.

Clients usually know these are simulations, of course, but the fact that I tease not being tagged is meant to suggest that a good mockup is one that centers the client’s brand, not the mockup source.

In other words, the presentation shouldn’t scream “Look at this cool mockup template!”; it should make the client think “Look how great my brand looks in action.” When a client is focused on their brand’s story unfolding in the presentation (and not distracted by the mechanics of how you did it), you’ve achieved the right balance of performance and authenticity. High-quality mockups help by not calling attention to themselves – they look natural. The emphasis on “present and document” is key: the point is to package the work professionally, not to upstage it.

Ironically, by dialing back on mockup overload, you actually increase the impact of the few scenes you do show. A single striking vision (like an image of a client's new storefront signage or a prototype of their app on a phone in someone’s hand) can spark a client’s excitement and discussion far more than a hundred trivial applications. Restraint is empowering in the designer-client relationship: it lets the design speak, and invites the client to engage with the idea, not just marvel at the Photoshop skills on display.

The Evolving Mockup Culture: Quality over Quantity

It’s worth stepping back to acknowledge that we live in a “mockup culture” now. In the past decade, there has been an explosion of resources and marketplaces dedicated to design mockups. Names like Mockup Maison, LS Graphics, Bendito Mockups, Art Directed Mockups, and Ostendo.Graphics (see what I did there?) are well known among designers, offering libraries of templates for nearly any scenario imaginable. Need your logo on a frosted beer bottle, shot with perfect lighting? There’s a mockup for that. Want to showcase a poster design being silk-screened by hand? There’s a mockup for that too. This abundance has undoubtedly elevated the visual quality of design presentations across the board. Even independent freelancers can easily access “a realm of exclusivity and superior quality” by downloading high-resolution mockups for free or cheap (thanks, ls.graphics) – something that used to require either doing custom photoshoots or painstaking 3D rendering. The democratization of these tools means that today’s clients almost expect a certain polish in how work is presented.

The ease of obtaining slick mockups can tempt designers to showcase everything, everywhere – what one UX Collective writer wryly dubbed the "Just brand everything?" syndrome. In that 2023 essay, the author Faux Icing pointed out the curious discrepancy between online portfolios and real life: designers would plaster a new identity on every conceivable surface to impress viewers, even surfaces that brand might never actually occupy.

This practice can border on parody – as Lucy Bourton’s earlier quote about holding up posters suggests, we’ve all seen portfolios where every project somehow has a tote bag, a billboard, a neon sign, a t-shirt, etc., regardless of whether those make sense. While these visuals can be fun, they raise a question: are we doing it for communication or just for spectacle?

Mockup culture at its worst encourages a kind of visual vanity metric (more mockups equals a more “complete” or “impressive” project) rather than strategic thinking.

Encouragingly, many in the industry are pushing back and advocating quality over quantity in mockups. The rise of specialized mockup studios is actually part of this push: instead of generic, low-quality freebies littering a presentation, designers now invest in a few premium mockups that truly shine.

Bendito Mockups, for example, has a philosophy that outright states: “Well-crafted mockups that will get you excited about designing stuff — and not the other way around.” This is a subtle admonition that resonates deeply – the mockup should serve the design, not the design serving the mockup. Bendito and its peers curate collections (often with real photography and carefully staged settings) so that designers can pick the perfect scene that complements the work. Admittedly, they also craft mockups that are recognizably "Bendito" and so tow a fine line between appropriate representation of design work, and downright overshadowing. That's another article...

When you use one of these, you typically don’t need ten others; the image is strong enough to stand on its own. Similarly, LS Graphics emphasizes “highest quality… perfect, highly customizable mockups.” Of course, their Figma plugin may make producing mockups so tantalizingly easy that they overwhelm you with endless options and of course, too many mockups. Regardless, the better these tools get, the fewer of them you should need to make a point. Perhaps by seeing your designs instantly in 57 mockups, you can cull to the impactful ones more quickly and with less to lose by not choosing to use one.

Client Expectations with Design Mockups

We should also note that mockup culture has influenced client expectations. Many clients have seen those glossy redesign presentations on design blogs, so they come to expect a bit of theater. In response, some designers create bespoke mockups or real prototypes for key touchpoints (instead of downloading ready-made ones) to add authenticity.

For instance, if you’re pitching a new packaging design, you might actually print and assemble a few physical prototypes to photograph in a real setting. This can sometimes be more convincing than using the same stock mockup template everyone’s seen. It also reinforces authorship – showing you care enough to envision the real production.

One could say the mockup industry is converging on a singular idea: make it look real, make it count. The best providers are focusing on scenarios that truly matter (say, common signage formats, frequently used stationery, digital device frames) and making those as realistic as possible, rather than encouraging a frivolous scattering of the design onto unrelated objects. I mean, there's a reason we use real photographs in real scenarios instead of levitating phones surrounded by plastic amorphics.

For designers, navigating this culture means setting an example in our own work. It’s fine to use the advanced tools and beautiful mockups available – indeed, investing in a high-quality set of mockups for the right contexts can elevate a presentation immensely. But we pair that with the editorial judgment to know when to stop. And when presenting to younger designers or teams, we explain this rationale: why we’re only showing a few contexts and how that maintains the design’s clarity. This way, we promote a culture of intentionality.

As Giammaria suggests, ask yourself for each proposed image: “Is this mockup adding value to the story I’m telling? Is it helping the client better understand the project – or is it just adding visual noise?” [agiammaria.medium.com]. If you can confidently answer that it adds value, then it likely deserves a place. If not, perhaps save it for the appendix or leave it out entirely.

Now, with maturity (and maybe a little fatigue at seeing the same mockup tropes), the community is recognizing that restraint yields stronger presentations. Quality and storytelling trump quantity and spectacle. This is a healthy evolution – one that realigns presentation practice with the fundamental goals of design: to communicate, to solve, to connect with an audience.

Mockups as Subtle Amplifiers of Design

Alessandro Giammaria’s essay struck a chord by articulating something many seasoned designers have felt: mockups are wonderful servants but poor masters. They are indeed the art of visualization – an art that, when done with finesse, can elevate a design from a concept on paper to a vision of reality. By exploring how and why using fewer, more purposeful mockups enhances clarity (by spotlighting the message rather than drowning it), strengthens storytelling (by focusing on narrative-critical scenes), and maintains conceptual coherence (by aligning every image with the central idea) we might be able to cut all the mockup deadweight.

Importantly, exercising restraint with mockups is not about doing the bare minimum or making dull presentations – it’s about being intentional and strategic. It’s choosing the right visuals to amplify the design’s story, the way a skilled presenter uses just a few well-chosen slides to drive home a point. The restraint shows confidence in the work itself. And counterintuitively, it often leaves a stronger impression on clients and stakeholders: they walk away remembering the design solution and its story, rather than just an array of pretty pictures.

As designers, we should embrace mockups as instruments of clarity, not camouflage. Let the logo, the typography, the colors – the design elements we crafted – hold the stage, with mockups as the lighting and scenery that enhance the performance. If at any point the scenery threatens to steal the show, it might be time to dim those lights.

Ultimately, the art of using mockups lies in knowing when to stop. As Giammaria wisely prompts us, next time you prepare a presentation, ask yourself those simple questions: “Is this mockup adding value to the story? Is it helping the client see the solution better? Or is it just visual noise?” [agiammaria.medium.com] The answers will guide you to find that sweet spot where the design shines through, crystal clear and compelling, with just enough contextual polish to make it sing. In that sweet spot, less truly becomes more – and our work is all the better for it.