"Can you make it pop?"

Trigger warning for designers. I’m going to talk about a sensitive topic…

“Can you make it pop?”

“There’s too much empty space.”

“It doesn’t feel quite right.”

This feedback is coming from a genuine place, but we’d all be lying if it didn’t cause a little eye-roll moment for us designers who applied careful, formulaic thinking to every element of the work.

The instinct is to ask the client for more specific feedback, but first, let’s think about where these comments come from.

The key thing to remember is that the client might not know design, but they know their product and their customer inside and out.

“Make it pop” might mean “the most important message isn’t there.”

“Too much white space” might mean “where’s that piece of information they always ask about?”

“It doesn’t feel quite right” might mean “I don’t know how to explain why I don’t like.”

Founders come to us designers because they need someone with visual skills. That also means they don’t have the visual language we do and can find it hard to express why something looks wrong.

Our job is to help them unpack that reaction. Ask what they expected to see, what they think a customer might miss and why it matters. Then we can use our design judgement to address the concern. “Make it pop” becomes a much more useful starting point once we understand what they need it to do.