Dana Albrecht sent the feedback at 6:47 on a Tuesday evening. Three screens, two rounds of revisions already behind us, and one line of comment: “Love the direction, just needs a bit more pop.” No arrow, no highlight, no second sentence. I read it twice and then went to make tea, because I needed a minute before replying.
A word with no fixed meaning
“Pop” shows up in feedback more than almost any other word except “clean.” It gets used by founders, marketing leads, and sometimes other designers who should know better. The trouble is that it points to a feeling rather than a property. You can’t open the inspector panel and adjust pop by five percent.
Three real examples from the last year
I started keeping a log. A SaaS client wanted pop on a pricing page and meant the CTA button needed a shadow and a brighter blue, not a louder one. A skincare brand wanted pop on product photography and meant the background needed to go from off-white to a flat, saturated coral. A fintech client wanted pop on a dashboard chart and meant the baseline grid lines were competing with the data line for attention.
Translating the request
None of these were the same fix, but all three traced back to the same root: something in the hierarchy was flat. Pop is almost never about color intensity on its own. It’s about the gap between the loudest element and everything around it being too small to notice.
Contrast, not color
When I pull up a screen that’s been called flat, I check three things first: the luminance difference between foreground and background, the size jump between the primary action and the body text, and whether there’s a single element competing for the eye or three elements splitting it. Nine times out of ten, one of those three is the actual culprit, and color is just the symptom people can name.
A test case at Fernwood Supply
Fernwood Supply Co, a wholesale hardware distributor out of Grand Rapids, asked for pop on their quote request form in March. The form was correct, accessible, and completely forgettable. I didn’t touch the color palette. I increased the button from 14px to 16px type, added 8px more padding around it, and moved the secondary link from directly beside it to below, with 24px of space between them.
The next round of feedback came back in four words: “Yes. That’s the pop.”
Nobody is asking for louder colors. They’re asking for a moment in the layout where their eye knows exactly where to land first.
A short checklist before I touch the palette
Before I reach for the color picker when someone says a screen needs pop, I run through a shortlist:
- Is there one clear focal point, or are two elements the same visual weight?
- What’s the actual contrast ratio between the primary action and its background, measured, not guessed?
- Has whitespace around the key element shrunk over the last few revisions without anyone deciding that on purpose?
- Would the fix survive being converted to grayscale?
That last question does most of the work. If a layout still reads clearly in black and white, pop is usually one spacing or scale adjustment away. If it falls apart in grayscale, no amount of brighter color will fix it, and the client will keep asking for more of something that was never the problem.
What I still ask clients now
I’ve stopped treating “more pop” as a brief I need to decode alone. Now I ask a direct follow-up: can you point to the first thing your eye lands on right now, and is that the thing you want it to land on? Dana answered that question in one sentence and solved her own feedback for me. Most people can, once you give them something more specific to react to than a feeling.
