I designed a poster for the fictional Echo Festival in Illustrator — teal background, pastel squiggles, an artist list, dates for September 2025 in Turku. Flat vector, clean edges, no life in it yet.
To see it as a passer-by would, I mounted it on a photo of an electrical box and spent the Photoshop time on everything that ruins a perfect print: paper texture, grain, shadows from the box's edges, wrinkles where the paste dried, wear at the corners.
The tell that gives a mockup away is usually the surface: a poster that ignores what it's glued to. So the paper follows the box's dents and the colours sit in the same light as the street around them.
Two copies pasted one above the other, like the person hanging them had a quota — a small thing, but it sells the scene.