A crypto exchange app mockup for videos and thumbnails

First, the line you don’t cross

A mockup borrows a category, not a company. Laying a fictional venue out the way exchanges are laid out is fine; putting a real exchange’s name, logo or look on it is impersonation, and our acceptable use policy prohibits uploading anyone else’s logo or trade dress. And a mockup is a picture of an app, never a picture of an account. Shown to someone as your balance, it becomes fraud, whatever made it.

What makes a screen read as an exchange

Viewers recognise an exchange by a handful of conventions long before they read a number. The Binance-style template is built on them, so your job is the content, not the layout:

• A balance quoted in a coin, to eight decimal places, with its fiat value on the line underneath and Today’s PNL under that.
• A board of coins, each with a small line of its day, a last price and the change in a filled green or red pill.
• A spot ticket with an order book beside it: asks in red above the last price, bids in green below.
• Five tabs along the bottom: Home, Markets, Trade, Futures and Assets.

What they don’t recognise it by is a name. Like most exchange apps, the screens themselves carry no venue name at all. The name you give it lives on your home screen, under its icon, so if the name matters to the story, film the thumb tapping the icon.

Pick the screen for the job

Each of the five screens says something different, so choose the one that carries your idea before you fill anything in:

• Home says “an account”: the balance, the day’s PNL and a slice of the market in one frame. It’s the default choice for a thumbnail.
• Markets says “the market”: a full board of coloured change pills that reads as a rally or a sell-off before anyone reads a symbol.
• Trade says “about to trade”: a ticket, a book and a big Buy or Sell button. It’s the most technical-looking screen, and the one that says exchange rather than wallet.
• Convert says “a swap”: two cards, a rate and one button, easier to take in at a glance than Trade.
• Assets says “what someone holds”: the balance again, with every coin listed under it.

Make it your own venue

Three things turn the template into a place of your own:

• The name, set as App name (home screen), up to 30 characters. The editor suggests four originals — Bourse, Pit, Depth and Vertex — or you write your own. Stay clear of names that echo a real exchange.
• The icon. Upload artwork you made or have the rights to use. Skip it and the editor draws a letter tile from the name.
• The colours. Accent colours the Add Funds and Preview Order buttons, the lit tab, the underlines and the order sheet. Background sets the page, and the text switches between dark and light to suit it. Pick an accent that belongs to your venue rather than to a real one.

Fill it with a market that makes sense

The screen is only as believable as what’s on it. Two lists do most of the work, and they’re separate on purpose.

Markets: what the exchange lists

Up to sixteen coins, each with a symbol, a last price and a 24-hour change. The home screen shows the first six, so put the coins you want in the shot at the top. Volume isn’t typed: for well-known coins it’s worked out from the coin’s circulating supply and the price on screen, so Bitcoin’s reads in billions whatever the account holds, and a coin the template has no supply figure for shows a dash rather than an invented number.

Make the board tell the day

The change pills are the loudest colour on the screen, so they set the mood of a frame. With live prices on, they show the real market’s day, whichever way it went. With them off, you set each coin’s 24h % yourself, and the board can be as green or as red as the story needs. Each row’s small chart ends where its change puts it, so a coin up 9% climbs to the top of its box while one that barely moved draws a line that barely moves.

Holdings: what the account owns

Up to twelve coins, each with an amount. The balance, Today’s PNL, the Assets list, the ticket’s Avbl line and Convert’s balances all come from these rows. Trade needs a stablecoin among them to price its pairs in — USDT first, then USDC and a few others — and Convert needs at least two coins.

Coins that don’t exist

A made-up token works in either list. Give it a symbol of up to ten characters, a price and a 24-hour move — those boxes stay open for it even with live prices on, because the feed has nothing to replace them with — and upload a logo. Without one, it shows up to four letters of its symbol on a grey disc. The seventeen coins the template draws itself, from BTC and ETH to TRX and TON, never ask for one.

Put the venue somewhere

Fiat sets the account’s currency: US dollars, euros or rupiah. Anything other than dollars also adds a second line under each price on the board, in that currency, the way a local venue quotes it. The P2P card goes further, with nine currencies from rupiah and pesos to naira and lira, so a venue can be placed in a particular market without a word of copy.

The rest of the home screen

• Search hint, up to 28 characters, is the line in the search bar: a trending note like the default, SOL top gainer.
• The promo card takes a title, a pair and a countdown, or switches off. Its round mark comes from the first three letters of the pair, so a pair starting with BTC, ETH or SOL carries that coin’s mark, and its Trade button opens the Trade screen.
• The P2P card quotes one coin against one currency, in whole units. That suits a pair where the coin is worth many units of the currency — the default is USDT against rupiah, at Rp17,565 — while USDT against dollars or euros just reads $1 or €1. The Convert card beside it quotes a reference rate a touch under the P2P price.

Getting a still for the thumbnail

Under the publish button, the editor has Export PNG (3x). It saves the screen the preview is showing — the app alone, without the phone frame — and the preview navigates, so you can tap through to Trade, Convert, Assets or Markets and export any of them. Four things to know before you rely on it:

• A free account’s export carries the mark. The preview shows SIMULATED · POZER.COM across the screen’s main figure, as the app does, and the export captures it. Pro at US$12.99/mo removes it.
• Order sheets and receipts don’t open in the editor, only in the published app. A still is for screens; the moments belong in the video.
• The export captures the prices of the moment. With live prices on, a thumbnail made today won’t match a video filmed next week. Turn Live prices off if the two have to agree.
• The editor opens on the template’s defaults every time. Changes after publishing are made in the app itself, through its Edit button, so take your stills in the session you build it.

At thumbnail size only the biggest type survives: the balance, the change pills, the Buy button. Crop to the one that tells the story and let the video carry the detail. If the thumbnail is all you need, a still may be the whole job; if it’s the cover for a video, filming the scene is the next step.