Are you looking to create video or photo mockups? Or a custom logo? Check out the awesome tool Placeit.
If you work on the web, you’ve probably already heard of this well-known platform that is truly the digital designer’s alibaba cave. Since 2012, Placeit has been growing at a rapid pace with today’s offerings for all types of freelancers: YouTubers, musicians, streamers.
A platform that has the particularity to generate particularly realistic mockups…
How do I use Placeit myself? How do I create custom mockups? What other services are offered? That’s what we’ll see together in this guide.
What is Placeit?
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guillamont15Placeit is a company acquired in 2018 by Envato, the company behind Themeforest, CodeCanyon and many other sites related to the creative world. Themeforest offers themes, CodeCanyon scripts and plugins.
A digital giant in short.
They have enriched their services on the web with Placeit. This site is a huge library of digital resources: animated and non-animated logos, business card and flyer designs…
I use Placeit mainly to generate mockups (ebooks, products) but I recently turned to the “Gaming” range of the site.
You wonder what it is? Let’s have a look at it.
Placeit, yes, but for whom?
As I said in the introduction, this platform is mainly for digital creators, but not only.
Marketers are fans, as well as e-retailersbecause with a simple subscription per month, they can save hundreds and thousands of euros in photo shoots. It’s a good alternative to graphic designers, even if I’m 100% for using them when you have the budget.
Sellers will find use for Placeit, as well as influencers and many other web professions. The possibilities of this platform are therefore much more numerous:
- Image and video mockups
- Various designs
- Thousands of customizable logos
- Video templates
What does Placeit have to offer?
Mockups” section
This is indeed one of the big advantages of Placeit and it’s mainly for this reason that I use it. There are thousands of image or video mockups. An example of what you can get with Placeit :
In the case of clothing, drapes, folds and the positioning of the design are taken into account by the generator. The program that manages all this is even powerful, the preview is almost in real time. The handling is simplified.
There are not only clothes, but mugs, book covers :
How to use the Placeit mockup generator? It is very simple.
- Choose a mockup from the catalog (+ 38 000 templates)
- Customize it via the site editor (color, text, logo, positioning)
- Download the final result compatible with commercial use
The categories range from iPhone mockups, through hats to masks… They are divided into five groups with subgroups:
- Apparel
- Digital
- Poster
- Printed on demand
- Promotional
The list is very long and it’s even better that I don’t list them all! The trendy mockups of the moment are the following:
Unsurprisingly, t-shirts dominate the top of the ranking along with tank tops and even mugs.
Designs” section
What do I mean by “designs”?
Like Canva which provides customizable templates, Placeit offers a wide selection of ready-to-use designs for various purposes.
Let’s say you’re looking for a design for your ebook, you can find suitable covers in “Book Covers”. Or let’s say you’ve recorded an album but you’re missing the artwork… Guess what, Placeit can provide it.
And everything is customizable.
The “Social Media” section provides an array of illustrations to use in Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and even Fiverr posts, it’s amazing :
And the editor behind allows you to change the text, colors and anything else you want. Ready to post on Insta.
If you run a print-on-demand e-commerce store, Placeit has hundreds of designs for apparel at your disposal. It saves you a lot of time and money.
Logo section
Along with mockups, Placeit logos represent the bulk of the products sold on the platform. More than 16,000 logo templates are available with, of course, always the possibility to customize them.
Usually for my logos I go through a provider on 5euros.com but that does not prevent me from having remarkable Placeit logos in dozens of sectors:
- Consulting
- Architecture
- Beauty
- Security
- Finance…
Placeit has a dynamic logo generator. For each category you can indicate the name of your company to have a quick overview of the possibilities. For example with my first name “Thomas” :
For the consulting category I have listed more than 300 logo templates… It’s huge knowing that afterwards the editor allows you to adapt them to your branding and your graphic code. At the moment, some topics are hot on the internet, for example cryptocurrencies. Placeit provides some templates:
The Video Maker
Since Placeit is not only about still images, the designers and developers also thought of adding a video editor with templates again, ready to use. This is how it works.
First you have to choose the type of video:
- Slideshow presentations
- Instagram Story
- Intro
- Product Demo
- Instagram video
You click on the option that best suits your web project and then select the template. It always works this way on Placeit. To create Instagram Stories the choice is vast: more than 300 templates. For Slideshows, more than 250 templates.
The “gaming” section
Where it is well seen from Placeit, is to have focused on a growing market. The gaming world. If you want to create something in the world of video games, you have the choice on Placeit with logos, designs for POD, Twitch overlays, avatars…
Logos for eSports:
Templates for streaming:
Or video intros:
I love the gaming world and this section speaks to me. If I ever want to start a project, I’ll take a look at Placeit 🙂
How to create a mockup with Placeit?
I’m going to show you how I create my mockups with Placeit, because that’s why I mainly use it. I often need mockups related to the “Digital” category, so I access this category.
Beforehand, I either buy a design, or order it from a freelance designer, or do it myself on Canva or Photoshop. In any case, you need a high resolution design.
This design can for example be the cover of an ebook, so I type “ebook” in the search bar:
I need an image with a transparent background, the second one is fine. I click on it to edit it. I need to add my cover design at 800 x 1200 pixels and the back cover at 200 x 1200 pixels. Here’s what it looks like:
For paid mockups (you’ll see below how to get some for free 😉 ), you have to take out the credit card before downloading the final image. Two payment methods:
- Single purchase (most expensive option)
- Unlimited subscription (best option over multiple purchases)
How much does Placeit cost?
The one-time purchase is more expensive than the subscription in many cases. For example for my ebook cover, the price, if I buy only this design, comes to $7.95 :
Using the Placeit subscription which costs $14.95 per month or $89.69 per year is much cheaper. The subscription unlocks an unlimited number of resources to download every month.
The subscription pays off roughly after two mockup downloads per month.
It’s similar to the Envato Elements subscription, which unlocks all the resources in the Envato marketplace for $14.50 per month. If you plan to use Placeit at least two or three times a month, I strongly recommend you take the subscription.
If a one-time purchase is more convenient for you, the rates are as follows:
- 2.95 per design
- 7.95 per image mockup
- 9.95 per video mockup
- 9.95 per video mockup
- 39.95 per logo creation
This marketing strategy helps push the subscription. It’s much cheaper to take one or two months of Placeit subscription than to buy a $40 logo. Plus, I’m lucky enough to be able to offer you a 15% off coupon on Placeit products:
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guillamont15How to get free Placeit resources?
I notice that a lot of entrepreneurs think that Placeit is only for free, this is not quite true. There is a hidden section that provides free resources.
These resources can be :
- Logos
- Mockups
- Designs
- videos
- Templates
In short, anything you might need to use. To explore the free resources, go to the bottom of the page and click on “Free Templates”:
Now you know how to access the hundreds of free Placeit templates. The left sidebar allows you to filter what you need. Don’t hesitate to visit this page regularly as new templates are added every month!
What are the alternatives to Placeit?
This guide would only be complete if I talk about the alternatives to Placeit. Here are some of them depending on your objectives:
- Canva is the first alternative that I know well because I use it regularly. It’s much more than a web graphics editor since tons of templates are integrated. Free version is enough for occasional use.
- Magic Mockups is a second alternative. It is a mockup generator dedicated to high-tech devices: computer, mobile and tablet. This site is free but very limited in use.
- Story Creator is a freemium application that allows you to create videos for social networks with a library of images and videos ready to use.
What do I think of Placeit?
As a website editor, my opinion is necessarily positive since I use Placeit for my mockups and logos, even if it’s true that I haven’t done the full tour of the platform. At first I thought:
“If everyone uses Placeit, then are we all going to have the same logos?”
In reality, there are so many resources available (designs, videos, images) that can be customized that it’s unlikely you’ll run into the same logo on another website. The more you customize, the more unique your final product will be.
The main advantage is the price, even if you buy several logos individually, the prices remain correct compared to some Fiverr sellers or 99designs providers.
