DESIGN
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What "Make It Pop" Actually Means.
May 2, 2026 · 8 min read
Advertising & Design Terms Defined
At some point, somewhere, someone said "make it pop"... and the entire creative industry collectively nodded like they absolutely knew what that meant.
They did not. Neither did the person who said it, honestly. But everyone was very committed to the bit, so here we are, thirty years later, still saying it in meetings with complete confidence.
"Make it Pop" has been floating around studios, print shops, and marketing meetings for decades. It likely traces back to the print-heavy days of newspaper advertising, when standing out on a crowded page wasn't optional. You either caught someone's eye or you disappeared into the gutter. The page gutter. Not an actual gutter. Though after some late-night deadline sessions, it's honestly been a close call.
After 30 years in the creative trenches, across branding, packaging, print, web design, and more marketing meetings than any of us are willing to put an actual number on, we've collected a mediocre dictionary of advertising agency phrases that sound incredibly confident and mean almost nothing without a translator standing nearby. So let's fix that. Here's what we actually mean when we say these things. Plain English. Zero textbook energy. Occasional sarcasm and bad jokes, completely free of charge.
"Make it Pop!"
Definition: Make the RIGHT thing stand out. Not everything. Just one thing. Specifically the right thing... and we really cannot stress that last part enough.
Pop is about contrast and focus. It's the difference between walking into a room where everyone is shouting at once and one where a single voice cuts through clearly. We are not trying to make everything louder. We are trying to make one thing matter more than everything else around it.
A great modern example is the RXBAR. They don't out-shout an entire never-ending shelf of protein bars already screaming at you in neon. They simplified. Big, clear ingredient list. Nothing is competing with it and your eyes know exactly where to go because there's only one place to look. You know what it is, what's in it, and you didn't need a perfectly styled tablescape photo spread to figure it out. Not that we have anything against perfectly styled table top photoshoots... we actually love them. We do them. Please hire us for that.
Here's the truth we've learned after three decades of doing this: the moment something finally pops is almost always the moment we stop adding things and start removing them. Sometimes the bravest design decision is just a really satisfying click of the delete key. Ok, maybe a couple, or 12ish clicks, but either way it can be quite satisfying.
"Let's Tighten This Up."
Definition: We are saying too much, and it's weakening everything.
This one shows up when a design has slowly collected "just one more thing" over time. One more callout. One more badge. One more idea that felt absolutely urgent at 4 pm on a Tuesday. Before long, nothing is actually landing because there are too many somethings all competing to be seen at once, and the result is a whole lot of noise that the human eye politely ignores and moves right along from.
Tightening a design isn't cutting it down. It's protecting the idea that's buried underneath all the clutter. Apple has built an entire brand philosophy around this kind of ruthless restraint, and what stays and what goes is always a deliberate strategic decision, never an accident... people feel it, even when they can't explain exactly why.
Also, and this part is important: tightening something should not feel like punishment. It should feel like finally cleaning out that junk drawer you've been avoiding for the better part of a year. You know the one. The drawer with three dead batteries, a takeout menu from a restaurant that closed in 2009, and one of those little corn cob holder things you've never once used in your entire life. Yeah, that drawer. Clean it out. You'll feel amazing. Your designs will too.
"We Need Stronger Hierarchy."
Definition: Right now, everything feels equally important, which means nothing at all is.
Visual hierarchy is how you tell someone where to look first without saying a word. It lives in size, placement, color, and spacing... all the quiet little decisions that guide the eye before the brain even has time to catch up.
David Ogilvy, widely considered the father of modern advertising and the man responsible for some of the most iconic campaigns ever created, made a point that still hits hard today: on average, five times as many people read a headline as read the body copy. Five times. Which means if your headline isn't pulling its weight, the rest of the piece is essentially a very well-designed secret that nobody ever finds out about. It may be a beautiful secret, one that costs real money to produce. But one that nobody reads.
The headline is the front door to everything that follows. If it doesn't immediately earn attention and invite someone to keep going, all the brilliant stuff behind it might as well not exist. This is why we spend what probably looks like a disproportionate amount of time on one or two lines of text. It's not perfectionism. It's math.
"This Feels a Little Off."
Definition: Something is interrupting the flow, and we are going to find it even if it takes us the rest of the afternoon and one too many cups of coffee.
This is honestly the hardest phrase to explain and the easiest one to just feel in your gut. It's usually not one big mistake. It's a collection of small ones... slight misalignment, spacing that is just a touch too tight, a color that almost works but lands about three percent wrong in a way that is genuinely difficult to articulate without pointing at a screen and making a vague circular gesture with your hand. You know the gesture. Everyone in a creative meeting knows the gesture.
We've learned to trust that instinct completely. If something feels off, it almost always is. And once it gets fixed, through brainstorming and a pair of digital scissors, and the kind of trial and error that looks chaotic from the outside but actually has a method, everything else suddenly clicks into place.
It's like a picture frame that's hanging just slightly crooked. You might not notice it right away... but once you do, it is absolutely all you can see. Every. Single. Time you walk into that room. Straighten it, and suddenly the whole wall looks better, and you can breathe again like a normal person. Or maybe that's just our particular brand of OCD showing up uninvited to the party. Either way, please tell us you understand. We need this.
"Can We Give It More Breathing Room?"
Definition: It's too crowded. It's working way too hard. We need to open things up and let the design actually breathe before it passes out on the floor.
When a design feels cramped, it creates visual tension. Your eyes don't know where to land, so they keep moving around looking for somewhere safe to rest... and usually they give up and move on entirely. That is the opposite of what we want.
Spacing gives things importance. It tells the viewer, without using any words at all: this matters, look here, this is the thing. Luxury brands figured this out a long time ago. Take Chanel, for example. Their print ads don't fill space just because space exists to be filled. One product, A generous amount of room around it. Suddenly, your attention has absolutely nowhere else to go, and next thing you know, you're in the car heading to the mall, making financial decisions you definitely hadn't planned on. We're not saying the white space made you do it. But we're not saying it didn't.
Space is a tool, not a gap, and it does just as much work as the elements you can actually see. Sometimes you don't need a neon arrow or a flashing callout box pointing at the important thing. You just need to give it room to exist... and the eye will find it on its own.
"Let's Punch Up The Headline."
Definition: This is technically correct, but nobody is stopping for it, and stopping is the entire point.
Headlines have exactly one job: earn attention. Not explain everything. Not sound impressively thorough. Not demonstrate how much research went into the brief. Just make someone pause long enough to keep reading, because if they don't pause... none of the other work gets to exist in their brain at all. It just scrolls away forever. Goodbye, brilliant body copy. You deserved better.
The strongest headlines say one thing clearly and confidently without trying to do everything at once. No fluff. No corporate buzzword bingo. Nothing that sounds like it was written by someone in a slightly too-tight blazer who has never once met an actual human customer. Just a message that lands cleanly and makes the reader feel something, even if that something is just mild curiosity about what comes next.
Our personal gut check, after all these years, is still pretty simple: if we wouldn't stop to read it ourselves, why would anyone else? And if it sounds like something that could appear on literally any other brand's ad... we rewrite it. Every time. Without negotiation.
"The strongest headlines say one thing clearly and confidently without trying to do everything at once."
"This Needs More Brand."
Definition: It looks polished and pretty, but it doesn't feel like you yet, and feeling like you is actually the whole point of the exercise.
This happens more often than people realize and it's honestly nobody's fault. A design can be genuinely beautiful and still feel completely generic, like it could belong to anyone and therefore really belongs to no one in particular. When that happens, it doesn't matter how nice it looks because it isn't building anything specifically for you.
The goal is for your brand to feel recognizable before someone even spots your logo. Tiffany's blue does this. The McDonald's arches do this without a single word of text. These brands have been around long enough that consistency isn't even a strategy anymore; it's just muscle memory. The good news is you don't need 70 years and a global marketing budget to start building that kind of recognition. You just need to decide who you are... and then show up that way every single time, across every touchpoint, without exception.
Build the brand guidelines. Follow them. Guard them like they are your firstborn. Hand them to everyone who touches your brand and make them read the whole thing, even the parts about font weights that seem excessive. That consistency is not decoration. It is equity you are building with every single impression, and it compounds over time like a very stylish savings account that you never have to feel guilty about.
"Will This Translate To Print?"
Definition: Are we designing for the real world or just for the screen? Because those are two very different places with very different rules.
Print is where beautiful screen designs either come to life in a way that makes you tear up a little... or go completely sideways. Think attempting to cut your own bangs after watching one too many TikTok videos.
Here is the part where we get a little technical, and we promise to make it as painless as possible. Monitors display images at 72 pixels per inch. Commercial printers output at 300 dots per inch. That is not a rounding error. That is a fundamental difference that means a photo that looks absolutely gorgeous on your screen can print as a soft, slightly tragic blur on a brochure. Colors shift between RGB and CMYK. Different paper stocks absorb ink differently. Finishes change how light hits a surface and how the whole piece feels in someone's hands. Not sure what that alphabet soup means? Check out our blog post about the different types of colors for print and web.
Print has been part of our DNA since before a lot of our current clients were born. We've been on press, we've seen the good and the catastrophic, and we've learned to take production seriously precisely because it's so easy to get wrong in ways that don't show up until 5,000 pieces are already boxed up and waiting in your lobby. "It looked great on my screen" is a sentence we would very much like to never hear from a client. Or say ourselves. We have said it ourselves. Once. We don't talk about it.
"Let's Optimize This For SEO."
Definition: We want people to actually find you online, ideally without you having to pay for every single click until the end of time.
Search has changed a lot over the years. It's less about stuffing keywords into every paragraph like you're packing a two-week trip into a carry-on, and more about genuine clarity. What are people actually looking for? What problem are they trying to solve? How do we answer that in a way that makes sense to a real human sitting at a computer and not just the invisible algorithmic robots crawling through the internet in their tiny digital trench coats?
Because here's the thing about a website that isn't optimized for search: it's out there. It exists, and perhaps it even looks great. But absolutely nobody is finding it. It is, for all practical purposes, a very well-designed message in a bottle, floating somewhere in the general direction of the internet, hoping the right person happens to drift by. Unfortunately, they probably won't. The ocean is large, and your bottle could sink.
We approach SEO the same way we approach design: start with what actually matters most, remove what doesn't, and make the important stuff impossible to miss. That means writing that sounds like people actually talk. Structuring pages so information is easy to find on the first try. Making sure your site loads fast enough that nobody rage-quits before they've read a single word. An engaging design will get people to stay, but good SEO practices will get them there in the first place. It is not the flashiest part of the job, but it might be the most important one, because you genuinely cannot impress people who never find you in the first place.
"We Should Explore a Few Directions."
Definition: There's more than one smart answer here, and we'd like to find out which one is actually the best for your brand before we all commit.
The first idea is usually good. It's the most obvious solution, the one that makes sense immediately, the one that arrives fully formed, confident, and kind of proud of itself. And sometimes, honestly, it's exactly the right decision, and we go with it. Everyone is happy, and we all go home at a reasonable hour, and that is a beautiful thing.
But sometimes... It's just the starting line. The second direction forces you to look at the same problem from a completely different angle. It might feel a little less safe, a little more unfamiliar, which is usually a good sign. It means you've pushed past the comfortable answer into genuinely interesting territory. By the time you get to a third direction, you're not reacting anymore. You're seeing patterns, understanding what actually matters about this problem and what's just noise. That's where the potential for more unique and possibly better decisions begins to happen.
We don't explore for the sake of having options. Nobody needs ten versions of the same concept in slightly different fonts, which is the creative equivalent of trying on the same pair of jeans in every wash and acting like they're completely different pants. We explore to pressure-test the thinking, to make sure we haven't settled too early on something good when something great was just one more round of ideation away.
A Few More Classics, Decoded
So, where does "Make it Pop" actually land after all of this?
It's not about brightness. It's not about adding one more element or making the logo bigger or cranking up the saturation until everyone's eyes water. It's about intention, knowing what matters most, and then designing every single decision around that one thing until the whole piece serves it completely.
When it works, you don't have to explain it. You don't have to point to it. You don't have to ask anyone if they noticed. You just feel it... and so does everyone else in the room.
That's pop. And when you hear us say it, now you know we're not talking about louder. We're focused on smarter, cleaner, more intentional. More you. That's where the good stuff lives, and after 30 years, we are still genuinely thrilled every single time we see it.
— The team at Triple e Digital, Clearwater FL. Makers of things that pop. Intentionally.
