Most of us are probably familiar with in-house design office speak. Whether you’ve worked at an architecture, product design, interactive or graphic design firm or an advertising agency, you have learned over time the true meaning of that plethora of friendly sounding expressions that nudge you into compliance. This ongoing list is meant to humorously unmask those design office euphemisms, by putting into words what a creative normally only feels but never articulates.

#1. Thanks for rolling with the punches! [Thanks for letting us abuse you and taking it bending over!]

#2. You gotta rock ‘n roll on this... [We know we’re not giving you enough time, but if you don’t get it done anyway, we blame you]

#3. Thanks! [All the above will piss you off but the exclamation mark means that I do not want to hear your response, just do it.]

#4. It’s so creative! [Yeah… this is not happening, but before we crush it and make it lame, we’ll pretend we love it.]

#5. Does that make sense? [I’ll pretend that my infuriating instructions are smart and logical and if you disagree, it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, but that you’re stupid]

#6. Great work, but can we see a few more options? [What do you mean design is not like choosing a meal from a menu?]

#7. It’s approved with these small fixes! [This is where entire projects get redesigned, while it is implied that that is because you did it wrong, and they just have to fix your mistakes, but don’t worry, they’re not mad at you.]

#8. It’s not what we expected. or, it’s not what we had in mind. [We were completely incapable to put into words or a brief what we needed, and are now surprised to learn that you creatives don’t have that magic client-gut-feeling-reader we thought you had. Therefore, your work is bad.

#9. We love it but, can we just see that in blue? [No comment]

#10. We don’t think our audience will understand this... [Ofcourse we have no idea what our audience thinks, plus “Audience” is not one person whom you can ask for their opinion, so we can freely abuse this vagueness to dismiss your carefully developed concepts.

#11. It is what it is. [We know it is painful and unreasonable that we make you do this, but we’ll just pretend that it is an act of god and we just can’t help it… [Cue sad face.]]