I've always found this part oddly clunky. When pitching a campaign idea as an article, product story or editorial placement, the typical workflow feels like: take a screenshot of a publisher site, rebuild bits in design software, try to match fonts, place headline and image, export, then redo half of it when the copy changes.
For social mock-ups, there are plenty of tools. But for article-style mock-ups, it still seems most teams are hacking it together manually.
Curious how others approach this - do you build properly in design software, use templates, edit screenshots, or keep it intentionally conceptual until approval?
a colleague mentioned they use a mix of screenshots and Photoshop with some reusable templates for major publishers, but font-matching is still tedious. Another noted that the dynamic nature of article layouts means small copy changes break the entire composition, unlike standardised social formats. Someone else suggested AI tools can do a decent job with the right instructions, but I haven't tried that yet.
Honestly surprised there isn't better tooling for this - social mock-ups were solved years ago, yet editorial placements still feel like a stone-age process. Perhaps because layouts are inherently more complex than dropping text into an Instagram template.
