I need you to know that I say this with love, because I have heard it from clients I adore, clients who paid on time, clients who sent me cookies once (still thinking about those cookies). But if you open a project kickoff call with “I just want it to pop,” a tiny part of my soul leaves my body. Not because it’s a bad instinct — you’re not wrong to want your design to have energy — but because “pop” isn’t a design direction. It’s a feeling with no coordinates attached to it.
Here’s my issue with it: “pop” could mean neon colors and bold type. It could mean a big striking photo with minimal text. It could mean high contrast, or a wild pattern, or honestly sometimes it just means “louder than whatever my competitor has.” Without more to go on, I’m not designing to your vision — I’m designing to my best guess at your vision, and guessing is how you end up with three rounds of revisions that all start with “hmm, not quite.”
So instead of “make it pop,” here’s what actually gets me somewhere useful, fast:
- Show me things you already love. Doesn’t have to be design-related. A restaurant menu, an Instagram account, a book cover, the packaging on your favorite candle. Aesthetic taste shows up everywhere, not just in other logos.
- Tell me what you don’t want, which is sometimes easier to articulate than what you do. “Not corporate,” “not too cutesy,” “nothing that looks like a kids’ brand” — all incredibly useful.
- Describe the feeling, then let me find the visual language for it. “I want people to feel like they can trust me immediately” is a real, usable brief. “Pop” is not.
- Bring adjectives, plural. Three words that describe the vibe you’re going for (playful, grounded, a little unexpected) will get you further than one vague verb.
The businesses I’ve done my best work for are the ones where the owner trusted me to translate a feeling into a visual system, but still gave me enough raw material to work with. Design is a collaboration, not a mind-reading exercise, even though I have gotten unsettlingly good at guessing over the years.
And look — if you genuinely don’t know what you want yet, that’s fine too, and honestly more common than not. That’s what the discovery questions in my design brief are for. I’d rather spend twenty extra minutes up front asking you what you loved about your favorite childhood cereal box than burn a whole revision round chasing “pop.”
The best brand identities I’ve built didn’t “pop.” They fit. They felt like the business they were representing, on sight, before anyone read a single word of copy. That’s the actual goal. Popping is just what happens when the fit is right.
Here’s a little translation table I’ve built up over the years, for the vague phrases that show up most and what I actually do with them:
- “Make it pop” usually translates to wanting more contrast or energy somewhere specific — I ask which part should feel loudest, the color, the type, or the imagery.
- “Something modern” almost never means minimalist by default anymore, whatever it might have meant a decade ago — I ask for three logos or brands they’d currently call modern, since the word’s meaning has genuinely shifted over time.
- “Nothing too crazy” is doing a lot of quiet work protecting someone from a fear they haven’t fully named yet — I dig into what “crazy” would actually look like to them, because it’s rarely what I’d have guessed.
- “You’re the expert, just do what you think is best” is flattering, and also occasionally a trap, because “best” without any of your input is really just my best guess dressed up as your vision. I still push for at least a few real data points before running with it.
I had one client, early on in my career, hand me almost nothing beyond “make it pop” for a logo project, and I made the mistake of just running with my own instincts. Three rounds of revisions later, all starting with a polite version of “not quite,” we finally landed on the actual brief buried underneath: she wanted the logo to feel like her grandmother’s quilting, but modern. That was the whole thing. One sentence, once we found it, and every revision after that landed within one round. I think about that project a lot, because it’s such a clean example of how much time gets lost chasing vague direction versus how fast things move once the real, specific feeling gets named out loud.