Explore every episode of the podcast Works But Makes Noises
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zohranās Campaign Design, Geriatric Millennials, and Ten Foot Skeletons | 10 Nov 2025 | 00:58:46 | |
Ten foot skeletons, Gen Z nonchalance vs. Millennial effortfulness,Ā Zohran's campaign design, Al Gore was the worst client. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Personal uniforms, electric bikes, and 90's ad agencies. | 17 Oct 2025 | 01:09:06 | |
Surfing in Mexico, Gap is back, having a personal āuniformā, Electric Bikes, NYC Subway design, AI slop (oh no), edible rocks, 90ās ad agency offices, naming things. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Two weddings, one Subaru, and an AI that designs your company | 26 Sep 2025 | 00:55:37 | |
New Grillitype launches, social battery collapse, Palermo wedding gossip, buying a 2008 Subaru on Facebook Marketplace, DMV purgatory, LL Bean collab trim, new iPhone and AirPods takes, AI brand builders, Jacob hates moodboards, designer existentialism David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Art, Aging, and AirPods That Randomly Beep | 06 Sep 2025 | 01:06:31 | |
Catskills nervous system reset, tiny New York party memories, birthday art pilgrimages, Mass MoCA, basic-taste art confessions, work-life blur, Apple event ambivalence, light-phone fantasies David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Robot Lamps, Appleās New Design Era, Utah 2034, Iconic Olympic Brands | 09 Dec 2025 | 01:02:18 | |
Snowstorms in the Catskills, Jacobās month on the North Shore, selling the Audi and becoming a full-time Subaru guy, mechanics doing power slides in your car, talking lamps and unhinged home robots, Terminator bots and the sci-fi week online, Apple entering a new design era, Googleās Nano-Banana and AI faking sketchbooks, Bloom and the rise of brand-asset generators, the new CNBC logo mess, Utah 2034 and the puzzle of future-proof Olympic branding, the icons of Olympic identity from Mexico 68 to Munich 72 and Montreal 76, and why mockups are still the secret weapon in design. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| The Rise of Home-Cooked Software, Authenticity & Imperfection, and When to Start a Design Studio | 10 Jan 2026 | 01:04:31 | |
The 52" monitor, home-cooked software, claude code, vibe coding, personal tools, craft, authenticity and imperfection, authorship and taste, designing without scale, having an independent design practice, freelancing vs studios, building a career on your own terms. Tesla Optimus Fail Dell's Big Boy Ryo Lu's OSĀ David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Special Guest Elizabeth Goodspeed on Design Education, Experimental Branding, Weird References, and Archiving Everything | 26 Jan 2026 | 01:04:49 | |
How to pay off sleep debt, ancient internships, should designers c*de? design engineers, teaching at RISD and Parsons, experimental branding briefs and constraint-led projects, what design school doesnāt teach, archives versus mood boards, Arena as a second brain, collecting and scanning physical references, folk packaging and diner placemats, obscure illustrators and forgotten ephemera, taste as something you build over time, trend reports and ināout lists, writing as a way of thinking, print, tactility, control, and staying creatively engaged without chasing trends. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Jony Iveās Ferrari, AI Copycats, Human-Washed Brands, and Faux Scribbles | 16 Feb 2026 | 01:01:59 | |
Ive's Ferrari collab, tactile design, electric performance, AI copycats, creative IP, opt-in consent, database tools vs model training, human-washed tech, the Granola rebrand, analog aesthetics, faux authenticity, proof of humanity, OpenAI vs Anthropic, authenticity vs costume. Jason Combs David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| The End of Wireframes, a Robot Vacuum Army, and Why Designing Backwards is the Way Forward | 02 Mar 2026 | 00:54:46 | |
Robot vacuum fleets, Claude code experiments, Personal SaaSpocalypse, closed loop design workflows, building before designing, design is the bottleneck, pushing to prod, the death of wireframes, grey box trauma, and unlearning the process. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Special Guest Allan Yu on Going From Designer to Founder, Pivoting Your Startup, and Why AI Should Be Invisible | 16 Mar 2026 | 00:58:10 | |
This week weāre joined by Allan Yu, designer and co-founder of community messaging app, Output. He previously worked as an early designer at Svpply, a cult favorite among designers, and later at Google Labs, Meta, and Shopify. We talk on designer to founder reality checks, pivoting your startup (again and again), Svpply nostalgia, type foundry UX rants,Ā building a Discord for normal people, design craft vs shipping product, venture-backed startup pressure, fake users testing your product, why consumers donāt care about AI, AI as invisible product magic. https://output.app David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Designing With Emotion, Elastic Branding, and Band Dynamics with guest Estee Kim, VP of Design at Soft Services | 11 May 2026 | 01:08:50 | |
This week we're joined by Estee Kim, VP of Design at Soft Services, the cult-favorite body care brand known for its meticulous design and packaging. We talk on multi-generational design families, her parentsā graphic design and signage shop in Philadelphia, and her grandmother Rose's collage practice. Estee walks us through Soft Servicesā design philosophy; how they capture sensory experiences visually, the brandās āelastic brandingā approach, the band metaphor for collaborative design teams, and why designing for feelingānot just functionāmatters in commercial work. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Getting Good Design Feedback, Figma Comments, and Electric Car Shopping | 13 Apr 2026 | 01:00:11 | |
electric car shopping and EV tradeoffs, figma comments and modern design feedback, fragmented feedback across tools, structuring better client critique, feedback psychology and confidence, figma shortcuts and workflows, productivity tools we donāt use, are.na websites and spatial, caveman codex, spring in upstate New York https://www.44xdesign.com/spatial https://tiny.garden/sites by @gndclouds WILLIAM FELKER https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Surf Apps & 70ās Surf Racks, Figma Config, Homebrew Study Aides, Hand-Finished Design, Reverse Airbnb, and Design Team Retreats | 30 Mar 2026 | 00:54:33 | |
surf forecasting tools and building personal software, jacobās 70ās surf rack archive and design lineage, figma config branding and pushing beyond the parent brand, using ai to study and learn through narrative instead of memorization, planning a retreat for type designers and the limits of structured āfunā https://www.infinitemachine.com/ David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||
| Digital Collecting, a Bauhaus Awakening, and the Ethics of Copying, Crediting and Remixing in Design | 26 May 2026 | 01:06:18 | |
This week we're getting moooooody ā moodboards, that is! First we talk David's new iOS app Archiv, which lets you photograph and catalogue what's around you. Then we wade into the thorny world of design inspiration, copying, and downright plagiarism, vague posting without credit, and the blurry line between inspiration and theft. We tackle wether moodboards are lazy shortcuts, explore why learning through mimicking great work actually teaches you something real, trace Davidās design awakening to his discovery of the Bauhaus, and ask: how much of design is just remixing culture anyway? We talk about having our own work ripped off, the commercial stakes of credit, and how to know when copying crosses from homage to wholesale theft. David McGillivray is a designer and creative director in upstate New York, designing for early stage tech companies through his own practice. He also co-founded Offhours and runs Corners, an art and design store in the Catskills. | |||