"Make it pop" is the most mocked phrase in the design industry.
It shows up in every collection of terrible client feedback. Designers trade stories about it the way soldiers trade war stories. It's become shorthand for everything frustrating about working with clients who don't speak the language of design — vague, unactionable, slightly insulting in its implication that the designer simply forgot to make the work good.
The mockery is understandable. "Make it pop" is genuinely unhelpful as literal instruction. It gives the designer nothing concrete to act on. It doesn't say what's wrong or what would be better. It's the feedback equivalent of telling a chef the food needs to taste "more delicious."
But the mockery is also a failure — a failure of the designer to do the part of their job that matters most when feedback is vague. Because "make it pop" is not meaningless. It's a real perception, honestly reported, in the only vocabulary the client has. The client is seeing something real. They just don't have the words for it. And translating their imprecise report of a real perception into a precise design diagnosis is not the client's job. It's the designer's.
The Client Is Describing a Real Experience
When a client says "make it pop," they're reporting a genuine experience: the design isn't doing something they expected it to do. It's not commanding attention the way they hoped. It's not creating the feeling they wanted. Something about it is falling flat, and "pop" is the word they reach for to describe the absence of whatever they're missing.
This is real information. The client is the audience, or a proxy for it, and their perception that the design isn't landing is data about how the design lands. A designer who dismisses "make it pop" as meaningless is dismissing a real signal because it arrived in imprecise language. The signal is valid even when the vocabulary isn't.
The mistake designers make is treating vague feedback as if its vagueness makes it wrong. The vagueness makes it imprecise, not wrong. The client genuinely perceives that something is off. The designer's job is to figure out what, by asking the right questions and applying the design expertise the client doesn't have. "Make it pop" is the beginning of a diagnostic conversation, not the end of a frustrating one.
What "Pop" Usually Means
In practice, "make it pop" tends to point to a specific set of design issues, and an experienced designer learns to recognize which one is most likely from the context. The phrase is vague, but the underlying problems it describes are not.
Insufficient contrast and hierarchy. The most common thing "pop" refers to is a lack of visual hierarchy — nothing in the design is clearly the most important thing, so the eye doesn't know where to go and the whole composition feels flat. When everything has similar visual weight, nothing stands out, and "nothing stands out" is exactly what "doesn't pop" describes. The fix is establishing clear hierarchy: making the important thing visually dominant through size, weight, color, or space, so the eye is drawn to it and the design has a focal point.
Lack of contrast specifically. Sometimes "pop" is literally about contrast — the design is low-contrast, muted, and the client wants more visual punch. Elements that blend into their background, colors that are too close in value, text that doesn't stand out from what's behind it all produce a design that feels weak. Increasing contrast — between foreground and background, between elements, between the focal point and its surroundings — is often exactly what "make it pop" is asking for.
Insufficient visual interest. Sometimes the design is competent but boring — correctly structured but lacking any element of distinction or surprise. The client senses that it's fine but forgettable, and "pop" is their word for the missing spark. The fix here is adding a considered moment of visual interest: a distinctive treatment, an unexpected element, a point of emphasis that gives the eye something to engage with beyond the merely correct.
Weak focal point. Sometimes the design has too many competing elements and no clear star. The client's eye is pulled in multiple directions and never lands anywhere satisfying. "Pop" in this case means "give me something to look at" — a dominant element that anchors the composition. The fix is often subtraction rather than addition: reducing the competing elements so the intended focal point can dominate.
Energy and dynamism. Occasionally "pop" is about a static, inert quality — the design feels still when the client wanted it to feel alive. This might point to a need for more dynamic composition, more energetic use of color, a sense of movement, or motion design that brings the static layout to life. The client wants the design to feel like it has energy, and "pop" is their word for the energy that's missing.
An experienced designer hearing "make it pop" doesn't hear meaningless noise. They hear a real perception, and they run through these possibilities against what they're looking at, usually arriving quickly at which one the client is responding to. The phrase is vague; the diagnosis usually isn't, once someone with design expertise applies it.
The Translation Skill
The ability to translate vague client feedback into precise design diagnosis is one of the most valuable and least taught skills in professional design. It's the difference between a designer who executes instructions and a designer who solves problems, and it's almost entirely about communication rather than visual craft.
The translation happens through questions. Faced with "make it pop," the unproductive response is internal frustration. The productive response is curiosity expressed through specific questions that narrow down what the client is perceiving. Where does your eye go first when you look at this? Is there something specific that feels flat, or is it the overall impression? When you imagine it "popping," what does that feel like — louder, brighter, more focused, more surprising? Is there an example of something that does pop the way you want this to?
These questions do two things. They give the designer the information needed to diagnose the actual issue, and they demonstrate to the client that their feedback is being taken seriously rather than dismissed. The client who said "make it pop" and got a thoughtful set of questions in response feels heard, which matters enormously for the working relationship. The client who said "make it pop" and got a visible eye-roll or a defensive explanation of why the design is already good feels dismissed, which poisons the collaboration.
The translation skill also involves managing the conversation toward concreteness without making the client feel stupid for their initial vagueness. The client isn't a designer; vague feedback is the expected and reasonable output of a non-designer responding to design. A designer who makes the client feel that their feedback was inadequate is punishing the client for not having a skill they were never supposed to have. The good designer absorbs the vagueness gracefully and does the work of making it precise, treating the client's imprecise feedback as a perfectly normal starting point rather than a failure to communicate properly.
When the Client Is Actually Right
There's a version of this dynamic that designers find even harder to accept: sometimes "make it pop" is correct, and the design really does need to pop.
Designers can become attached to restraint. A subtle, refined, low-contrast design can feel sophisticated to the designer who made it, and a client asking to make it pop can feel like a request to make it cruder, louder, less tasteful. The designer's instinct is to defend the restraint as the more sophisticated choice and to view the client's request as a lack of taste.
But sometimes the restraint is wrong for the context. A design that needs to capture attention in a crowded environment — a competitive market, a busy feed, a noisy inbox — may genuinely need more visual punch than the designer's refined instinct wants to provide. The client who says "make it pop" might be correctly perceiving that the design, however tasteful, won't perform in the real conditions it has to operate in. Sophistication that goes unnoticed isn't serving the client's goals, however much it satisfies the designer's aesthetic.
The mature designer holds both possibilities: the client might be perceiving a real deficiency that the design should address, or the client might be reacting to appropriate restraint that the design should keep. Distinguishing between these requires actually considering whether the design is serving its purpose in its real context, rather than defending the design reflexively. Sometimes the answer is that the design is right and the client needs to understand why the restraint serves them. Sometimes the answer is that the client is right and the design needs more energy. The designer who can tell the difference — who can defend restraint when restraint is right and abandon it when it isn't — is more valuable than the designer who always defends their work or the one who always capitulates.
The Broader Lesson About Client Feedback
"Make it pop" is the famous example, but it stands for a whole category of vague client feedback that designers tend to mock and would be better served taking seriously. "It needs more energy." "It feels too corporate." "Can it be more premium?" "I don't love it but I can't say why." "Make it cleaner." Each of these is imprecise, and each is a real perception reported in the only vocabulary the client has.
The designer who treats all of these as meaningless noise to be endured is missing the actual job. The client's perceptions are data. Their inability to express those perceptions in design vocabulary is normal and expected. The skill that separates good designers from merely competent ones is the ability to take imprecise reports of real perceptions and translate them into precise design decisions — to hear "make it more premium" and understand that it probably means more whitespace, more refined typography, a more restrained palette, and higher-quality imagery, and to act on that understanding.
This translation work is not a distraction from design. It is design — the part of design that happens in collaboration with the people the work is for. A designer who can do beautiful work but can't translate client feedback will struggle, because they'll either execute literal vague instructions badly or defend their work against feedback they refuse to understand. A designer who can translate — who treats "make it pop" as the start of a productive diagnostic rather than the punchline of a tired joke — will produce better work and better relationships, because they're actually solving the problem the client is, imperfectly, describing.
The phrase is mocked because it's vague. It deserves respect because it's true. The client really is seeing something. Finding out what, and fixing it, is the job.