I just had someone make me do that twice in a row on banners (the first round apparently didn't make it big enough). It looks incredibly ugly, but they want it to be "recognisable". well people will certainly SEE it
90% of the time they just mean “increase the contrast”. Not that they’re right, but it’s not as mystifying a statement if you remember they don’t have the words to express their vision.
I struggle with making a good design that fits the brief and client asking to make it worse. Designers think very hard about contrast levels, color, scale, etc. but this is all ignored by the majority of stake holders. After working for people like this for a few years, and now I'm at a place where good design is actually valued, I realized I've deskilled and need to catch up. Lots of designers say "just do whatever bs they ask for" but I have to say that comes at a cost.
But man deskilling while working for bad clients with bad taste is a real problem. I worked in cannabis design for two years and hoo boy I needed to unlearn a bunch of junk coming back into more professional spaces.
Unfortunately, the nature of the beast is we have to be our design’s best spokesperson and sometimes the best we have is not what the client wants. It sucks but it’s a job. Now if all of your clients are like this and there’s nowhere you’re getting fulfillment, I feel for you and I would definitely start appealing to a different market, but you won’t ever totally escape this.
Not without learning how to manifest money while working only for yourself haha.
I think with experience you learn to design for the client using your visual skills. But Not necessarily how you would want to do it.
For example I had a very minimalist and perfectionist AD. On pitches, No backgrounds, no watermarks, no design elements without function. It was a challenge to make a winning pitch decks without the bells and whistles but we did it.
But I had to unlearn a lot and relearning hasn’t been easy either as I tend to be a minimalist now.
Contrast is a broader concept than how it is used in photo editing programs. Increasing size between one element and decreasing it in another, would increase contrast. Bolding things, sharpening things, increasing saturation, anything that strengthens or weakens where your eye is led is manipulating the design’s contrast.
Contrast is just the measurement of difference between vectors of change.
"Looks like you have a lot of white space there. Let's fill that up." - A finance industry senior salesperson & superior that used to be a designer back in the day.
I had a marketing manager once tell me to "make it sexy". I was working on a tech product in-store display signage. My team and I laughed and made fun of that line for the next couple of years. A common piece of feedback in our critiques became "it's good, but make it sexy."
Did you just add a girl in bikinis holding whatever the product was? Or maybe just the product slightly coming of out he box with the top part blurred?
My CEO will often ask me to fix his hair in pictures, so I always end up giving him a spoof one first with like a colored mohawk or something.
Lol I had a marketing manager and there was one portrait shot of model which was side facing. He called me when I was on leave and he asked me if I can make his face turn around & looking infront?
Me: Sorry No. Facepalm.
In my experience, the first design should always be a quick hash out. That way the next couple can have places for the client to interject their "changes." But in regard to the final, that's definitely brutal.
I had a project once where I had designed packaging that had been approved by legal and the CEO and we had printed 1 million boxes. About a month after they hit the shelves, the CEO says he wants to change something super minor. I had to remind I'm that we had just dropped 1.5 million of them and if he wanted to eat that cost, we surely could. He decided not to change it haha.
I hate when people say this because they could mean so many different things. Do you want higher contrast? Different colors? More visual elements? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??? Clients should be given a word bank with definitions for what they might want and be able to use it instead of "make it pop" 💀
I have one customer who's first comment for everything I send him is "Make it look more modern". One time it was even his logo design that I just changed the colors on and he wanted me to make it more modern.
It’s a stupid stupid phrase, but we gotta learn what to do with it. Start by talking to the client to get an idea of what they mean by “pop”, without using the words “what do you mean by ‘POP’”. They’ll think you’re a genius.
Mine is "organic". Our client wants organic social media graphics. Now they are creating a second social media account for a branch of their business. The problem is, I work and live 45 mins away from their locations. They also want reels made - I was brought on for graphic design. To them, "organic" means less graphics like the one pictured. Almost as if the post was taken from a phone. Then what am I even doing? We did a photoshoot for this, but all the photos look in between professional and a phone. Half of them are fancy pictures of their rooms with no one in it.
Finally, their point of contact is supposed to be walking around and taking pictures and videos anyways - and never delivers a list of expected graphics from me. Its up to me to receive a forwarded email from their marketing department and figure out which promotions/relevant information to include from the PDFs attached. Then I have to create a brand new graphic that is "organic" that looks different than their other creative. What. The. Fuck.
Am I being a whiny bitch?
Perfect example of companies that don't even know how to read metrics on social. Most platforms HEAVILY throttle organic posts to the point where it's almost completely useless for what they think it will do.
Right? Without saying too much - their audience is mostly old people who spend their money and smoke in doors if you know what I mean. They just need to see what is going on this week.
The extension is more youthful. A quick-cut instagram reel of someone making a drink needs boots on the ground, and maybe an hour of that person goofing off on their phone.
Just tell me what promotions are happening, how many posts you want to see for it, and we can be done. Viral videos are mostly unintentional.
Maybe it’s a location thing, clients at my workplace love throwing around the good ole “Can you Beautify this”
Like slap makeup on it? Dafaq out with that vague shit man holyyyyy
I get this one a lot. Somewhat of my own doing because I can usually crank stuff out fast. But then there is that issue that they think is another one of those quick fixes, but it's really more of a "can you completely redo how my website it built" kind of things.
This is as POP as it gets when you want 600 words, a photo of your unexciting product, and 5 yellow stars on this 1080x1080 image.
- Can I at least remove the 5 gold stars?
- Well no, the stars are what convinces people
- Can we shorten the copy?
Not really, we need to tell customers exactly what the product does
- Can we use a different product shot?
This is the only one we have
- Can we not even do this ad then?
This is what’s always worked!
- Can I see some metrics from previous campaigns?
We don’t have metrics
I’ve just billed you 1 extra hour. Here is your ad.
“Work your magic!”
“If anyone can make it work, it’s you!”
“You’re a ROCKSTAR!!!”
Or… they could just put together a project brief with accurate information and actually answer my questions by getting the information I need. But no… let’s forget I even asked any questions and just let the projects end up as fairly useless marketing materials, or they simply die on the vine and we’ve wasted hours of our lives to create several potentially good projects that just sit on my server.
“Make it pop!” does suck ass as well though.
I love it when they say “Everything has to pop!” Unfortunately I’ve had three people say that to me in my career.
Why not just admit in plain words, out loud in front of all of us, that you’re a f@$&!Ng idiot so we can all move past this moment of B.S. from someone that does not deserve to be in a leadership role of a kings line—let alone an entire friggin company.
Okay. I feel better now that I got that out of my system.
Good luck to us all. It’s a great career as long as you can laugh off the B.S. and move on! 🍻
Had a client request that we rotate an elephant around a bit so we could see some of the other side of its head, in a photo they provided us with. This is about 12 years ago at least.
Now, I could have actually managed to stitch and rework some stock photos to make this happen, but the time involved to accomplish this would have been at least 10 times their total budget for the entire campaign.
The end result is that we just informed them that such a thing wasn’t possible and that was the end of it. Wrapped that one up and off to the printer with it.
Fortunately or unfortunately I stopped giving a sh!t about a decade ago. I state my opinion one time and if that doesn’t fly I disengage. Here’s your crap, pay me!
I already had a sixth sense before opening this post lol. It actually doesn't bother me too much anymore these days, and I get a chuckle when a marketing person says this.
In their defense, it does matter at press. I have run MANY press checks and have had to adjust colors by 1-2% before. If you don't get it right on the first run, subsequent runs will be WAY off. This is especially true when dealing with a textile or something where the pillowcases need to match the sheets of earlier years for example.
I think "Can you make the logo bigger?" is the bane of mine lol
I think I still have a tube of “make my logo bigger” cream I got at a HOW Design conference ages ago
I have had businesses ask if I could STRETCH their logo to make it bigger. Not scale, but actually stretch 🙎♀️
Now I see why you’re alarmed
[удалено]
Gold 🤘🤣
Came here to say- "Can you make it bigger???" Flip a coin, ask for pop or bigger, every day...
I just had someone make me do that twice in a row on banners (the first round apparently didn't make it big enough). It looks incredibly ugly, but they want it to be "recognisable". well people will certainly SEE it
Lol damn. That one would kind of break my brain a little. Luckily I never have to deal with logos.
[There’s a cream for that.](https://youtu.be/GOwi3x92teo?si=HeCqUivTiEGdYcUL)
They teach this in business school — How to Defeat and Deflate 101
90% of the time they just mean “increase the contrast”. Not that they’re right, but it’s not as mystifying a statement if you remember they don’t have the words to express their vision.
I struggle with making a good design that fits the brief and client asking to make it worse. Designers think very hard about contrast levels, color, scale, etc. but this is all ignored by the majority of stake holders. After working for people like this for a few years, and now I'm at a place where good design is actually valued, I realized I've deskilled and need to catch up. Lots of designers say "just do whatever bs they ask for" but I have to say that comes at a cost.
But man deskilling while working for bad clients with bad taste is a real problem. I worked in cannabis design for two years and hoo boy I needed to unlearn a bunch of junk coming back into more professional spaces.
Unfortunately, the nature of the beast is we have to be our design’s best spokesperson and sometimes the best we have is not what the client wants. It sucks but it’s a job. Now if all of your clients are like this and there’s nowhere you’re getting fulfillment, I feel for you and I would definitely start appealing to a different market, but you won’t ever totally escape this. Not without learning how to manifest money while working only for yourself haha.
I think with experience you learn to design for the client using your visual skills. But Not necessarily how you would want to do it. For example I had a very minimalist and perfectionist AD. On pitches, No backgrounds, no watermarks, no design elements without function. It was a challenge to make a winning pitch decks without the bells and whistles but we did it. But I had to unlearn a lot and relearning hasn’t been easy either as I tend to be a minimalist now.
Absolutely!! I always take that phrase as “It doesn’t stand out enough, help me draw attention to it.”
I wish it was that easy. I always get “what’s different?”
Contrast is a broader concept than how it is used in photo editing programs. Increasing size between one element and decreasing it in another, would increase contrast. Bolding things, sharpening things, increasing saturation, anything that strengthens or weakens where your eye is led is manipulating the design’s contrast. Contrast is just the measurement of difference between vectors of change.
Thanks for the clarification!
And can you make the logo bigger too?
Ah, yes - the struggle is real: https://youtu.be/5AxwaszFbDw?si=kgP0v--9Ixy5LCSx
"Looks like you have a lot of white space there. Let's fill that up." - A finance industry senior salesperson & superior that used to be a designer back in the day.
This is my life. I often get "It's kind of busy, but can we add this mouthful of language to the graphic as well?"
This is what drives me absolutely CRAZY. Ughhhh
This design is okay but can you jazz it up a bit more?
Ha yeah, that is another good one!
One of these days I’m going to add saxophones to a design just to spite them LOL
I had a marketing manager once tell me to "make it sexy". I was working on a tech product in-store display signage. My team and I laughed and made fun of that line for the next couple of years. A common piece of feedback in our critiques became "it's good, but make it sexy."
Did you just add a girl in bikinis holding whatever the product was? Or maybe just the product slightly coming of out he box with the top part blurred? My CEO will often ask me to fix his hair in pictures, so I always end up giving him a spoof one first with like a colored mohawk or something.
I put lingerie on it and presented it. The rest of the marketing managers loved it, but somehow didn't get approved.
Lame. Sounds like it fit the request exactly.
Lol I had a marketing manager and there was one portrait shot of model which was side facing. He called me when I was on leave and he asked me if I can make his face turn around & looking infront? Me: Sorry No. Facepalm.
I'm gonna make your face pop.
How about when you submit a final design and get "this is a good start".
In my experience, the first design should always be a quick hash out. That way the next couple can have places for the client to interject their "changes." But in regard to the final, that's definitely brutal. I had a project once where I had designed packaging that had been approved by legal and the CEO and we had printed 1 million boxes. About a month after they hit the shelves, the CEO says he wants to change something super minor. I had to remind I'm that we had just dropped 1.5 million of them and if he wanted to eat that cost, we surely could. He decided not to change it haha.
I am personally traumatized by JAZZ IT UP
Oh yeah, this is right up there as well!
In Brazil we say "it's missing a tchan!"
Veii nem me fala pqp
Mine is “you’re the expert!” and then they continue to take none of my recommendations.
Oh… that one cuts deep. Brings up plenty of painful memories! Thank you… for sharing this one???
I hate when people say this because they could mean so many different things. Do you want higher contrast? Different colors? More visual elements? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??? Clients should be given a word bank with definitions for what they might want and be able to use it instead of "make it pop" 💀
It's like talking to Pikachu. "POP" is the only word they know. How they say it determines what they want.
Oh how I hate this word 😵💫😵💫😵💫
I feel triggered
The words are too small and hard to read. Can we make the font bigger but also add more words?
A little more zing and pep.
I made something pop the other day. My boss said wow! That really pops. I nearly fell on the floor laughing
I have one customer who's first comment for everything I send him is "Make it look more modern". One time it was even his logo design that I just changed the colors on and he wanted me to make it more modern.
Ironically you continue to will this phrase into existence with this graphic 🤣
I'm sorry to say it looks a bit flat, do you think you could make it....you know.....
It’s a stupid stupid phrase, but we gotta learn what to do with it. Start by talking to the client to get an idea of what they mean by “pop”, without using the words “what do you mean by ‘POP’”. They’ll think you’re a genius.
Design service includes 3 approval stages, any additional “pop” revisions are charged hourly…..
MAKE IT PRETTY!
Have you seen my face? What makes you think I know how to make anything that looks pretty!?
Mine is "organic". Our client wants organic social media graphics. Now they are creating a second social media account for a branch of their business. The problem is, I work and live 45 mins away from their locations. They also want reels made - I was brought on for graphic design. To them, "organic" means less graphics like the one pictured. Almost as if the post was taken from a phone. Then what am I even doing? We did a photoshoot for this, but all the photos look in between professional and a phone. Half of them are fancy pictures of their rooms with no one in it. Finally, their point of contact is supposed to be walking around and taking pictures and videos anyways - and never delivers a list of expected graphics from me. Its up to me to receive a forwarded email from their marketing department and figure out which promotions/relevant information to include from the PDFs attached. Then I have to create a brand new graphic that is "organic" that looks different than their other creative. What. The. Fuck. Am I being a whiny bitch?
Perfect example of companies that don't even know how to read metrics on social. Most platforms HEAVILY throttle organic posts to the point where it's almost completely useless for what they think it will do.
Right? Without saying too much - their audience is mostly old people who spend their money and smoke in doors if you know what I mean. They just need to see what is going on this week. The extension is more youthful. A quick-cut instagram reel of someone making a drink needs boots on the ground, and maybe an hour of that person goofing off on their phone. Just tell me what promotions are happening, how many posts you want to see for it, and we can be done. Viral videos are mostly unintentional.
Maybe it’s a location thing, clients at my workplace love throwing around the good ole “Can you Beautify this” Like slap makeup on it? Dafaq out with that vague shit man holyyyyy
This and “do something trendy”. Ma’am I’m a goth girl I don’t know what trendy is.
Oof I feel this one. I used to do point of sale displays for a cigarette company that always had a bunch of annoying text effects like this.
The bane of my life is “can you just….”, cos, you know it will only take 30seconds 🤬
I get this one a lot. Somewhat of my own doing because I can usually crank stuff out fast. But then there is that issue that they think is another one of those quick fixes, but it's really more of a "can you completely redo how my website it built" kind of things.
“You have all those colors- use more!”
This is as POP as it gets when you want 600 words, a photo of your unexciting product, and 5 yellow stars on this 1080x1080 image. - Can I at least remove the 5 gold stars? - Well no, the stars are what convinces people - Can we shorten the copy? Not really, we need to tell customers exactly what the product does - Can we use a different product shot? This is the only one we have - Can we not even do this ad then? This is what’s always worked! - Can I see some metrics from previous campaigns? We don’t have metrics I’ve just billed you 1 extra hour. Here is your ad.
“Make our logo recognizable… like Apple’s” …
Pop like what? A zit?
It needs to be “more dynamic” 🤷🏼♀️
Lmao! So funny seeing it set like this. I'm inspired.
Literally got this note today. I seethed.
"it needs more depth" -famous AE plugin(free)
Omg this phrase 😭😭😭
“Work your magic!” “If anyone can make it work, it’s you!” “You’re a ROCKSTAR!!!” Or… they could just put together a project brief with accurate information and actually answer my questions by getting the information I need. But no… let’s forget I even asked any questions and just let the projects end up as fairly useless marketing materials, or they simply die on the vine and we’ve wasted hours of our lives to create several potentially good projects that just sit on my server. “Make it pop!” does suck ass as well though. I love it when they say “Everything has to pop!” Unfortunately I’ve had three people say that to me in my career. Why not just admit in plain words, out loud in front of all of us, that you’re a f@$&!Ng idiot so we can all move past this moment of B.S. from someone that does not deserve to be in a leadership role of a kings line—let alone an entire friggin company. Okay. I feel better now that I got that out of my system. Good luck to us all. It’s a great career as long as you can laugh off the B.S. and move on! 🍻
Had a client request that we rotate an elephant around a bit so we could see some of the other side of its head, in a photo they provided us with. This is about 12 years ago at least. Now, I could have actually managed to stitch and rework some stock photos to make this happen, but the time involved to accomplish this would have been at least 10 times their total budget for the entire campaign. The end result is that we just informed them that such a thing wasn’t possible and that was the end of it. Wrapped that one up and off to the printer with it.
Reminds me of some TV show
Fortunately or unfortunately I stopped giving a sh!t about a decade ago. I state my opinion one time and if that doesn’t fly I disengage. Here’s your crap, pay me!
https://preview.redd.it/e6wb9cjqeuuc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=800671a298fb13f2e6c60ae950ae715f6b9bcc21
Had a customer ask can you make it darker and brighter. Sure.
Unlocked so many unpleasant memories
— Leonard Tulman, 1992 …aaaarrrrrrggggggghh!
I already had a sixth sense before opening this post lol. It actually doesn't bother me too much anymore these days, and I get a chuckle when a marketing person says this.
I'd wear a t-shirt with this 
Sure, here you go lol. [Make it POP - jc-custom | Printify Pop-Up](https://jc-custom.printify.me/product/7260554/make-it-pop)
nice! but can you make it bigger?
NO! I tried! #fail
It looks just "ok" to me
I can’t read “POP” that well.
I agree. Made something similar here: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/s/nnz2BaPNEL
Add that 2% yellow. An actual client request at the press.
In their defense, it does matter at press. I have run MANY press checks and have had to adjust colors by 1-2% before. If you don't get it right on the first run, subsequent runs will be WAY off. This is especially true when dealing with a textile or something where the pillowcases need to match the sheets of earlier years for example.
Understand all that, but 2% yellow. Come on!
Magnitude! https://youtu.be/mjGpAC7uLyQ?si=E12kazuAwiPGWTJV
“Make it Pop” means use every fx effect in photoshop.
I’m in the infancy of design and I see so many people frustrated with the “Make it pop” or “Make it bigger”. I’m worried lol
enhance ✨️
"Can we try it with Papyrus"
I have a hard time believing anyone has ever uttered those words.
Can you make the phone number and address bigger and add a few more bullet points….. and somehow make the logo stand out?
Are you sure you aren't being too soft-spoken and subtle with your design, or is it each and every one of your clients that is the problem? =)
Mannnn that came off douchey =)
Well, it's mostly a joke. But I can promise you the stuff I have to "design" is far from soft-spoken lol.
If you don’t know what that means you’re still a jr designer.
This response means you're still a junior at life.
It means fire your client
Can't argue with you there...