Make It Pop
The phrase used to be a punchline.
A client says "make it pop" in a presentation and designers exchange a look across the table. It meant something vague about excitement, about the thing not feeling like enterprise software. We laughed because we'd heard it a hundred times, and because the fix was always the same: a bolder color, a motion treatment, a hero image nobody would remember two weeks later.
That version of joy was real.
Finding the right typeface for a system that would serve thousands of users every day. Getting a green light on something that actually felt alive. But the scope of the work has widened, and the pops have moved with it.
There's something genuinely satisfying about a token update that propagates correctly across twelve products, or documentation that closes a handoff gap that used to eat three days per sprint.
What I've noticed is that the human part of the work matters more in proportion to how much of it tools can replicate. AI can generate layout options, copy variations, and component states faster than any designer could. What it doesn't do is sit with a stakeholder who's convinced they already have the answer and ask the question that slows them down long enough to reconsider.
What I've noticed is that the phrase keeps mutating, but the underlying ask stays the same: someone on the team is still trying to make the thing feel alive. That part hasn't changed.
