Whether you’re a graphic design student or a professional with years of experience, these three design sites are worth bookmarking. I was exposed to these sites during my final year of varsity and believe everyone needs them in their back pocket.
If you’re already aware of them, that’s awesome. If you aren’t, these sites offer great (free) mockups to take your portfolio work and presentation of designs to a whole new level.
GraphicBurger
Whether you’re looking for mockups, UI kits or text effects, GraphicBurger has it all. What’s great is everything on their site is free for both personal and commercial use. Any and all of the iPhone photos in my Tech Girl pieces are mockups found on GraphicBurger. The mockups are usually PSD files with a smart layer you can drop your designs into. Quick, easy, and takes your CI designs from flat exports into IRL examples.
Mockup World
Sometimes you can’t find the exact IRL instance you’re looking to apply designs to, and Mockup World is likely to have what Graphic Burger doesn’t. Like a packaging mockup or IRL instances of desktop setups. Some of their links require you subscribe to their newsletter in order to “unlock” the mockup file – What I’ve done is I have set up a Gmail account just for these mockup subscriptions. Been doing this since 2014 and haven’t picked up any funny links or viruses as of yet (touch wood).
Free Design Resources .net
If you still haven’t found your perfect mockup at the first two, you’re sure to find it on freedesignresources.net. I personally use them for many of their t-shirt mockups since they’re slightly more personal than the ones found on the other sites.
Many of these sites function as a central hub for you to search mockups that are sourced from other mockup websites. I like this because you can search for everything in one spot, and get redirected to the original owner to download the official files. This way you save time having to sort through 50 URLs, and the original creator gets their work exposed.
I thought these were worth sharing to enhance your presentation of your work. They changed the way I present my designs and my portfolios look way more professional and polished.
