Design has grammar. Design has rhythm. Design has poetry. But instead of learning to write with it, most so-called “creatives” are busy parroting Behance decks and calling it fluency. They can tell you that “Brandon Grotesque has charm,” but they can’t tell you why the brand they built with it feels like beige oatmeal. They can kern a wordmark until it looks “balanced,” but they can’t inject urgency, lust, danger, or tension into a single fucking pixel. That isn’t fluency. That’s decoration.

Real fluency in design means knowing when a headline should scream and when it should whisper. It means using silence as much as noise. It means weaponizing contrast, color, and space to make someone feel before their brain catches up. A fluent designer doesn’t just push pixels. They orchestrate. They score symphonies in typography, rhythm, and contradiction.

And here’s the bitter pill: fluency requires vulnerability. It requires meaning something. Most designers would rather die behind their safe “style” than risk saying something real. That’s why so many portfolios are filled with mute layouts, beautiful gibberish. Work that’s desperate to be liked but terrified to be heard.

If you want to matter, stop arranging things and start speaking. Stop decorating and start writing with images, letters, and tension until the page cuts like language should. The world doesn’t need more pixel babysitters. It needs fluency.

So either learn to speak—or shut the fuck up.