Why Are Mock-ups Essential? Plus, Free E-Liquid Bottle Mock-Up PSD

We’re lucky as designers in this day and age as we have such open access to usable assets such as images, templates and mock-ups. However, at the same time, trying to find a quality asset is extremely difficult (especially without paying through the roof in some cases).

Usually, most designers are aware of the importance of ready-made mock-ups as they play an essential role when presenting the final product to the client during a project, displaying how the work/product will look after final completion.

Many designers will have first instincts to look around online and try using readily available templates from other designers online, which is perfectly fine and normally works out perfect. Although, unfortunately, there may just be the odd time where you just can’t get exactly what you need to display the product in the vision you picture it. Most will try to adapt to their liking and compromise, very few will create their own mock from scratch, especially Junior designers where their skill level doesn’t stretch far enough.

Fortunately, we deal with many E-Liquid products so having a great looking mock-up to present the finished artwork/product is essential for us. We have created our own E-Liquid bottle mock-up to display the product to our clients. Time-saving is also very important to us and is key to most mock-ups. We have 3D rendered our mock-up to have a flawless realistic finish to all shading and light, then using Adobe Photoshop have layered our artwork so we can easily switch our labels out and bottle types (e.g. lids, seals & body) so it’s better than most mock-ups should be! (Below you can see a well-presented breakdown of how our bottle is built).

What Makes a Mock-up Efficient?

As essential as mock-ups are to time-saving, sometimes they are the complete opposite. There’s a massive difference between a well-constructed one and a rushed job. More times than not you’ll find that a mock-up is quickly 3D rendered, slapped together and all merged down into one file with a simple click and swap job. These are good until you need them for more… let’s make a quick example scenario, you need to mock-up a client’s product on a box so you can use it in their latest advert, you find a template online that looks up to the job, perfect shadows, good lighting. You stick your artwork on and it looks amazing. Now the problem arises, everything is merged. You now have to spend your time cutting the mock-up out, recreating shadows which just makes no sense and is completely backwards.

To break it down, an efficient mock-up is:

• Well layered (shadows, lighting, reflections)

• Easily editable (smart layers, colour masks)

• Organised efficiently (structured folders)

• High quality resolution (ideally 2000px or higher)

• Transparent model/background

How To Use Our E-Liquid Bottle Mock-up?

Normally our mock-ups stay in-house only but that doesn’t mean we structure our template any different to how they should be laid out! As seen in the above example our mock-up is easily set up for quick, simple changes. We will give you a quick rundown on how everything works just in case you’re not entirely sure!

Upon opening the mock-up PSD file you should see something similar to this (this all depends on your layout, of course, ours is currently set to 3D for demo purposes). As you can see all the options for the template are located at the side in the layer’s bar, everything is straightforward to change minus the label if you’re not familiar with Photoshop’s 3D option. You can select a liquid colour if required as well as bottle types (white, black or clear) this applies to the lid, body and seal and is very simple to change as shown below.

Placing your label onto the mock-up is easy enough if you know how to use 3D options within Photoshop, the layer is already named so you know which to use and its just as case of editing the texture (located in the diffuse layer of the object) which is used as the label wrap and then saving it as you would with any other smart object. If you’re not familiar with 3D, then we have put a simple step-by-step guide together below for you so you know how to update the mock-up label.

1. Open the “Bottle Label” smart layer, this will open your label wrap.
2. Open the 3D Tab/Panel (if you can’t find this it’s properly not active, you can select this from Window > 3D). Also, make sure the “Artwork” layer is selected.
3. Select the 3D layer called “Label (Edit Me)” this is located under “Cylinder”.
4. Open the Properties Tab/Panel (again this is located under Window > Properties if not active).
5. Select the file icon next to the Diffuse/Colour Tab and Select “Edit Texture”. (You can place or edit your artwork in this layer and once done, save both this and the previous file which was the 3D layer. This will update the label in the main mock-up.

If you wish to download or take a look at our E-Liquid Bottle Mock-up you can download it here. Feel free to use it any project you wish!