Make it professional, make it pop
There are three phrases you hear over and over again as a designer:
- make it look professional
- make it look good, and
- make it pop!
Early in my career, these requests used to really bug me. Of course my work is going to look professional. Of course it’s going to look good. And as for “make it pop”, what does that even mean?
Now, though, I quite enjoy hearing them. Not because they’re precise. They aren’t. But because they usually point to something more useful underneath. They give me, and the clients I’m working with, a way into a better conversation.
Here’s my partial translation of each one. Not a definitive version, just a starting point:
Make it look professional
This often means: we’re worried we don’t look credible. We don’t feel like we stand out in the right way. Sometimes we’re not even sure we fit in. We’re concerned that we come across as amateur, lightweight, or not quite serious enough. We want to look like the business we know we are.
Make it look good
This one is trickier. To me, it usually means we need to dig deeper. Sometimes the client has had bad experiences with design in the past and is reacting to that. Sometimes they’ve become attached to a particular idea, and we need to work out whether it’s actually helping or quietly getting in the way. Sometimes they just know something feels off, but they can’t yet say what.
The aim here is not to jump straight to a surface-level question like “does this look good?”. It’s to explore the problem, the context, and the wider goals more thoroughly.
Make it pop
This usually points to one of a few things. Maybe they want to stand out from specific competitors, or catch the attention of a particular audience. Maybe they’ve ended up in an arms race where every piece of communication is shouting, so the instinct is to shout louder. Maybe they’re simply bored of their identity or materials. Or maybe something isn’t working, and they’re pinning a lot of hope on visual energy to fix a deeper issue.
What makes these phrases useful is not that they tell you what to do. It’s that they tell you where the uncertainty is.
They’re often not really design instructions. They’re signals. Signals about confidence, positioning, frustration, fear, aspiration, or a sense that something is not landing.
Taken literally, they can lead nowhere. Taken seriously, they can open up the conversation that actually needs to happen.