Instant Mockups: Removing friction from creative work

Designers face an interesting paradox when bringing packaging concepts to life.

Creating precise, beautiful designs usually happens in Adobe Illustrator—vector-based tools and layers offer unmatched control. But then comes the next step: visualising these designs on actual products. This is one of the most crucial yet least creative parts of the packaging design journey. Visualising the packaging as it will be seen on a shelf or in someone’s hands helps designers to assess whether their design stands-out, whether it fits with the brand’s overall aesthetic and ultimately to get to sign-off faster.

The process here is surprisingly fragmented and cumbersome. Designers find themselves jumping between Photoshop templates with smart objects, or diving into complex 3D software like Blender and Keyshot. This step, while crucial, consumes far too much time and distracts from the core creative work.

We developed Instant Mockups in Spring to directly tackle this problem. Our goal was simple: let designers move quickly from 2D artwork to photorealistic product visuals whilst providing them with a suite of editing actions to ensure they maintain control. By streamlining visualisation into a single, intuitive tool, designers can now communicate their ideas clearly and efficiently, staying focused on creativity rather than technical overhead.

Instant Mockups embodies a broader principle: technology should empower creativity, not hinder it. When great tools remove unnecessary friction, creativity thrives. And that's exactly why we built this.

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What does Instant Mockups do?

The first time consuming part of the visualisation process is finding a good packaging render to use, which could be a template file for Photoshop or a 3D model. It’s challenging because not only do you need to find the right product type, but you also need to make sure the size matches your artwork close enough to look realistic. Instant Mockups lets you pick from a large library of base models, and each base model generatively creates a product that resizes automatically to fit your artwork.

Secondly, we know that designers often create multiple versions of artwork for a given packaging item, and it takes time to visualise them one by one. Instant Mockups lets you upload multiple versions of artwork and generate visualisations at the same time in a single click.

Thirdly, part of the design process can often involve looking at artwork visualised on different product types (brand or creative expression). Instant Mockups lets you apply artworks to multiple products simultaneously.

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The technology behind Instant Mockups

Instant Mockups was developed in Manchester, England as part of the Sourceful R&D efforts to improve the workflow for designers. There were many technical challenges in building this product but the most challenging was ensuring layout accuracy, meaning that the position of your logos, text and assets on the artwork need to be accurate in the 3D render even with shadows, lighting, rotations, curving, bending, occlusions etc. We trained a mix of models to achieve this consistent layout projection across many different types of products from printed perfume bottles to large corrugated shipping boxes.

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How did you achieve the speed?

When you use a powerful tool like Blender, Photoshop or Keyshot, there are a lot of manual actions you have to take including preparing the artwork, swapping out different artworks, rendering and exporting. This means that these are done sequentially one after the other.

In contrast, Instant Mockups uses cloud rendering to provide you with essentially 100 virtual machines running in parallel at the click of the mouse, that spin up and down as you need them. It’s like temporarily renting 100 Apple Macs for 10 seconds.

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Bonus: Generative adaptation

One interesting thing that we observed during early access testing was that designers would try providing artwork designed for one packaging format but visualised on another packaging format. In this environment, the model cannot make the product match the artwork because that product wouldn’t “make sense” in the real world. Instead, it needs to adapt the artwork to fit the dimensions of the product. Whilst this part of the technology is still developing and improving, it’s one of the magical moments to see how it can make a square artwork work on a thin chocolate bar, or a chocolate bar artwork be adapted to a square mailer box.

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Future

We released Instant Mockups for general availability on 14th April 2025 as the first step on a multi-step roadmap for making visualisation of 2D artwork simpler and more powerful for designers.

We welcome feedback and collaborators if you are interested in the following areas:

1. Visualising products in a scene (e.g. on a real life photo of a store shelf)
2. Multiple products in a single scene
3. Higher resolution rendering (up to 16K resolution)
4. More control on rotation, perspective and scale