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Rough Drafts - Exploring Creative Process - by BOUNCE

BOUNCE

Rough Drafts – Where ideas are still forming.

Most design podcasts focus on finished work: the award, the commission, the retrospective. Rough Drafts goes earlier. Each episode explores the thinking before the thinking — the first sketch, the direction that didn’t work, the moment a project changed shape.

It’s not confessional, and it’s not about failure. It’s about what the creative process actually looks like when you’re inside it: ambiguous, iterative, collaborative, and often uncertain until very late.

We talk to graphic designers and typographers, architects and urban thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and game designers working across Ireland and beyond. To social innovators using design as a tool for change, educators building the next generation of creative thinkers, researchers asking the uncomfortable questions about what design is actually for. To the craftspeople and the coders, the brand strategists and the community artists, the independent studios and the solo practitioners working out of a room at the end of the garden.

Some guests are well known. Some are doing the most interesting work you’ve never heard of. What they have in common is a willingness to talk about the version before the version — to show you the sketch before the sketch, the draft before the draft, the conversation that happened before anyone knew what they were making.

Rough Drafts is made in Ireland, with designers and creative practitioners from across Europe and beyond — because the best creative process conversations don’t care about geography. Irish design has a distinctive voice, a particular relationship to craft, language, and identity, and a community of designers and practitioners who are doing genuinely original work on a global stage. Rough Drafts is a place to hear how that work actually gets made.

New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts — or sign up for updates at bouncecreative.ie and be the first to know who's coming up next.

Every episode comes with, process images, and the materials guests brought to the conversation — the early sketches, the abandoned directions, the slides that didn't make it to the presentation. The stuff that usually ends up in the bin. That's the bit we're interested in.

Rough Drafts is a podcast from BOUNCE — Ireland's independent platform for design thinking, creative process, and critical discourse.

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14 episodes
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S2 · E5
Tuesday · 1 hr 22 min
Seán O'Beacháin // Creative Confidence
How to Cultivate Creative Confidence as a Solo Designer: Insights from Seán O'Beáchain In the world of design, the journey to establishing a unique voice and creative confidence can be a winding path. Seán O'Beáchain, the founder of So Studio, shares his experiences of navigating this journey without formal training in design, ultimately leading him to create his own successful studio. In this blog post, we will explore Seán's insights on what it means to cultivate creative confidence when you are the entire creative team and how collaboration plays a crucial role in the creative process. Understanding Creative Confidence Creative confidence is not just about having the right skills; it's about believing in your ability to create and innovate. Seán's journey illustrates that confidence can be built over time through experience and by embracing one's unique perspective. He emphasizes that many aspiring designers often doubt their capabilities due to a lack of formal training or established credentials. However, it's important to remember that creativity can flourish in various forms and backgrounds. The Importance of Collaboration One key aspect of Seán's success has been his ability to collaborate effectively with various partners throughout his career. He highlights that collaboration doesn't just enhance the quality of work but also fosters a supportive environment where ideas can thrive. By surrounding himself with talented individuals and maintaining relationships with past colleagues, Seán has been able to draw on diverse perspectives that enrich his projects. Choosing to Stay Small in a Scale-Driven Industry In an industry that often equates size with credibility, Seán's decision to keep So Studio small is a testament to his belief in quality over quantity. He argues that staying small allows for a more personalized approach to design, enabling deeper connections with clients and a more hands-on role in every project. This philosophy challenges the notion that bigger is always better and reinforces the idea that a small studio can deliver exceptional results through dedication and creativity. Lessons Learned from a Non-Traditional Path Seán's experience is a reminder that there is no single path to success in the design world. His journey from collecting design-related items as a child to eventually founding his own studio is filled with valuable lessons. He encourages aspiring designers to embrace their unique journeys, acknowledging that every experience adds to their creative toolkit. By sharing his story, Seán inspires others to pursue their passions, regardless of the obstacles they may face. Key Takeaways - Creative confidence can be developed through experience and self-belief. - Collaboration is essential for enhancing the creative process and producing high-quality work. - Choosing to stay small can provide opportunities for personalised service and deeper client relationships. - Everyone's journey in design is unique; embrace your *non-traditional path* as a strength. Seán O'Beáchain's insights provide a refreshing perspective on the importance of creative confidence, collaboration, and the value of maintaining a small studio in a competitive industry. By focusing on these elements, aspiring designers can cultivate their unique voices and thrive in their creative endeavours. __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to our Patreon, for more content, live talks, case studies and more.
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S2 · E4
October 26 · 30 min
Irish Design Week
Irish Design Week is nearly here, and this year’s programme is one of the strongest yet. In this episode, Danielle walks through some of the standout events across the country — from craft workshops to policy summits — before sitting down with Susannah Montgomery, Business Development and Ecosystem Manager at EIT Culture & Creativity, to talk about the biggest event in the calendar. The European Creative Industries Summit, Fáilte Future Europe, runs 10–13 November in Dublin as part of Ireland’s EU presidency. Susannah explains what EIT Culture & Creativity actually does — hint: it’s not funding content, it’s funding the tools and infrastructure that allow the creative sector to grow — and why this summit is different from the kind of conference that produces great conversation and nothing else. They get into digital sovereignty and what it means in plain terms for a graphic designer or filmmaker, the idea of “rewilding” the creative sector away from dependence on a handful of big tech platforms, and why Ireland’s particular mix of deep cultural identity and outsized tech presence makes it a fascinating place to have this conversation right now. There’s also a genuinely useful breakdown of what EIT funding is currently available, who it’s for, and how to figure out if your idea is eligible before you go near an application form. Open funding calls for EIT Culture & Creativity: https://eit-culture-creativity.eu/your-opportunities/calls-funding Event website: https://failtefuture.eu/ Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/failte-future-for-europe-ecis26-tickets-2002740893926?aff=oddtdtcreator __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to our Patreon, for more content, live talks, case studies and more.
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S2 · E3
October 13 · 1 hr 8 min
Una Healy // Hi from a Human
In this episode we talk about the parish priest giving permission for Una to go to art college, designing Valentine's cards that backfired because all the boys thought Una had sent them, the second-hand Mac bought from a buy and sell magazine and QuarkXPress learned from a book in a week. This episode is thirty years in the making. What this conversation explores is what sustains a practice across three decades. The big project in this episode is Hi from a Human — a mark Una woke up one morning and decided to create, and released to the global creative community before she had time to think herself out of it. We go into where it came from — the anger, not the kind she feels often, at watching illustrators and designers lose work to AI systems built on their own creative output — and her ambition for it. We talk about the dementia-inclusive shopping project, that won the Universal Design Award at the IDI Awards. About the drawer of shame and about what Una tells young designers who are waiting until they're ready, she says, only good things come when you jump. Go to: https://hifromahuman.com/ and download your marque that showcases your human ingenuity. __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to our Patreon, for more content, live talks, case studies and more.
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S2 · E2
September 29 · 1 hr 28 min
Niamh McArdle // Collaborative Process
Niamh McArdle is a designer from Galway, based in Dublin, and sometimes Florence. She works freelance to allow her the freedom that travels brings, but at the heart of her work is a distinctly contemporary Irish design aesthetic. In this episode she speaks about her interests that have enriched her design, from film, literature, writing and her family's habit of collecting and curating objects of place and ultimately of nostalgia. As a graduate into the world in 2020, she speaks about getting started when the world was in chaos, a pandemic graduation that came with no show, no ceremony, no moment of arrival. Not that it held her back - with incredible projects she deep dives into her work while at Slater, working collaboratively with the studio team on a book design that ultimately went on to win a D&AD pencil for Book Design. The process of making this book is incredible - with the artist Paul Yates described as ‘in concert’ with the team throughout. Everywhere she goes, she finds inspiration, a collector of ideas, from cafes in Italy to workshops, to keep her making and her hands busy. Her next rough draft may involve embroidery, Florence, and something she hasn't quite worked out the shape of yet. _ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Listen on Apple // Listen or Watch on Spotify, Patreon and YouTube
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S2 · E1
September 15 · 59 min
Sarah Moloney // Feels So Real
In today’s episode. I speak with Sarah Moloney, graphic designer and illustrator based in Dublin. This is a conversation about what sustains a practice over a long time, and the answer turns out to be emotion and the pursuit of a genuine felt response in whoever encounters the work. Sarah Moloney describes it plainly: she wants people to feel a connection. Everything else in her practice follows from that. We talk about the relationship between style and design: why Sarah's work is always recognisably hers and never the same answer twice, and why the distinction matters more now than it ever did before. We also go into AI, not as a threat but perhaps there is light on the horizon with a trend towards and focus on handmade, maybe this will prove to propel the industry forward rather than dismantle it. Just to note there are a few dips in the WIFI, but nonetheless a beautiful showcase of work and of her career at the centre of illustration led design. __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Listen on Apple // Listen or Watch on Spotify Patreon and YouTube
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S1 · E8
July 13 · 27 min
BOUNCE 2027 // Open Call
This years theme is FRICTION. Exploring what it means to resist, slow down, and make things that could only come from you. In the fast-paced world of design, the common mantra is to "remove friction" to create seamless experiences. But what if friction is not just a barrier but a necessary part of our creative and personal journeys? Check out this episode where I delve into the theme of friction as a crucial element in design and life, exploring its implications and the deeper insights it can provide. I dissect the sub-strands: Friction as Method: Process, Resistance & the Slow Work Friction as Signal: What Difficulty Teaches Friction as Presence: Trust & Self And I go through what a successful proposal looks like and give some ideas for the above strands. It really is all you need to know. ____ The Open Call is open to Patreon Subscribers only ahead of general open date later in the summer. → Join for free at patreon.com/c/bouncecreative No card required. Just a free account and you're in! ____ The Open Call for Workshop facilitators is also open for applications year round and is available here. Best of luck!
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S1 · E7
July 6 · 1 hr 19 min
Hazel Coonagh // Time and Memory
Hazel Coonagh is an Irish photographer and visual artist who starts with a portrait taken in the ordinary way, and then takes it somewhere else entirely. Through digital manipulation, hand embroidery stitched through paper and canvas, and a visual sensibility drawn from Japanese art, surrealism, and Art Nouveau, her work creates images that feel both completely new and deeply familiar. There's a nostalgia to them that she can't quite separate from the mediums themselves: photography and embroidery are both, at their root, about time and memory. In this episode we trace how embroidery arrived in her practice her incredible RTÉ Illuminations commission during lockdown, the night she saw her work projected onto the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park, and the housing crisis piece Halfway to Nowhere, which was made in her back garden with a cardboard house balanced on her head. We talk about The Art Riddler show, independent arts funding in Ireland, and a frank conversation about AI; why it lacks soul, how it's dulling creative taste, and what makes a real photograph irreplaceable. __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Listen on Apple // Listen or Watch on Spotify Patreon and YouTube
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S1 · E5
June 29 · 1 hr 44 min
Naoise Ó Conchubhair // Drawing from Here
Today's guest is Naoise Ó Conchubhair, someone whose entire career has been shaped by an obsession with type, the Irish language and the conviction that the best design always comes from understanding your context before you touch a single letterform. We go way back to Naoise’s childhood, a furniture designer father, a grandfather who founded an Irish language publication, and a mother who was involved in the founding of TG4, the Irish language broadcast channel, here in Ireland. We get deep into Insular the Gaelic typeface Naoise designed for his final year project at NCAD, a project that grew from a mystery tour through Irish banknote lettering, a 1976 typeface competition, and the extraordinary stone cutting lettering of Michael Biggs at the Garden of Remembrance and Arbour Hill. We talk about Song of the Sea and the joy of watching your handwriting appear on the Lighthouse Cinema screen as part of the film, which was nominated for an Oscar. About more modern and recent work MGNÉ, where a fada became a brand device about Free Market, the Venice Architectural Biennale, the Wonder Cabinet in the Dead Zoo, the National History Museum, and the maddening precision of brass letters that were too perfectly made to fit together. Naoise gives incredible detail of not just the process, the projects, but the people whom he deeply respects and collaborates with, the joy of teaching the new wave of design students and the changing landscape of operating in design right now. This episode is available to listen to on Apple, but there are so so many projects to see, I highly recommend watching the video of the podcast which is available on Spotify, YouTube or over on our Patreon. I can't thank him enough for his generosity of time and his work shows a new modernity for Irish identity and the future of Irish design. Enjoy. __ Rough Drafts is a podcast from BOUNCE for anyone who's ever stared at something unfinished and wondered if they were on the right track. Designers, artists, and thinkers talk about the messy, uncertain, deeply human process of making things. Rough Drafts – Where ideas are still forming. Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Listen on Apple // Listen or Watch on Spotify, Patreon and YouTube
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S1 · E5
June 21 · 55 min
Pauric Freeman // Immersive Experiences
There are very few experiences in contemporary design/art that make you forget where you are. In this episode I speak with Pauric Freeman, whose performances are one of them. He performs live audio-visual shows in venues where the audience watches someone make the work in real time. In the episode we explore his process and its slowness as a value, not a problem. He returns to this repeatedly and without apology speaking about programming a component that might take days and might not work. He doesn't frame this as a struggle, he frames it as how good work actually gets made. There's a quiet confidence in that, almost a refusal of the pressure to produce quickly. He believes that what happens between a piece of work and an audience, in the room, in the body, in the brain's fusing of sound and image, is real, meaningful, and irreplaceable. He says this in the language of psychoacoustics and cross-modal integration. But underneath the technical vocabulary is someone who genuinely believes that being fully present inside an experience is one of the most worthwhile things a human being can do. And that it's worth spending years learning how to make that possible for other people. What you get in this conversation is an understanding of how that experience is constructed from the ground up. The years of slow, iterative tinkering that were the building blocks of his creative vocabulary. The realisation that when sound and image are experienced simultaneously, the brain doesn't process them separately, it fuses them into something that feels deeper and more present than either could produce alone. There's also one of the most quietly compelling conversations about AI and creative practice you'll hear, not the usual debate, but something more specific. About why the serendipity that lives inside slow, iterative, human-made work simply cannot be prompted into existence, and what is lost if we stop protecting that. Pauric Freeman is someone who moves slowly, thinks carefully, trusts the process, and believes, without making a fuss about it, that the unrushed, human-made, fully immersive experience is something worth protecting. Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch where you get your podcasts Listen on Apple Listen or Watch on Spotify or Patreon
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S1 · E4
June 15 · 55 min
Ashley Shak-Penn // Material Systems
In this episode I speak to Ashley Shak-Penn who has spent a decade building things around the globe, from the United Nations to Dublin’s Startup scene, and now as Managing Director of Dublin Independent Fashion Week (DIFW). We talk about her varied background, where the contexts change, but the problems are the same. That tension is what this conversation keeps returning to, not as a problem to be solved neatly, but as something she's sitting with honestly; How do you formalize a grassroots movement without killing its energy? How do you charge for something that was built on generosity? How do you make the case to institutions that fashion is a fundable art form when the legislation hasn't caught up with what everyone already knows to be true? Ashley doesn't pretend to have all the answers. But if anyone can address them, she can. She’s dynamic, driven and completely focused on getting things done to amplify and build the fashion industry in Ireland. Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch where you get your podcasts Listen on Apple Listen or Watch on Spotify or Patreon
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S1 · E3
June 8 · 1 hr 8 min
Sarah Bracken Soper // It takes time to be an overnight success
Sarah Bracken Soper has been making art for twenty years. She only became a full-time artist two years ago. That gap, doing every job that kept the lights on while the practice quietly grew alongside it, is one of the most honest things discussed in this conversation. We talk about what "Artivism" actually means when you're living it. About making work that doesn't just sit on a wall but argues with it. About the specific tension of representing someone else's community, someone else's grief, someone else's story — and what it takes to do that without ego getting in the way. She speaks choosing using thread and embroidery, to depict women who are changing the course of Irish history. We get into what it costs to hold political convictions publicly as a working artist — the online abuse that comes with feminist and anti-racism work, the decisions about which commissions to take and which to decline Sarah is honest about all of it, including the moments where she's still figuring it out. And then there's the structural question underneath everything — the one about who gets to be an artist at all. About the unpredictability, the spreadsheets, the eighty percent of your time that is admin and proposals and applications before you ever get to make anything. About the basic income for artists and whether it's enough, and about who gets quietly filtered out of the creative sector before they ever get started because the financial reality of it simply doesn't add up. Sarah is open and genuinely uninterested in performing a version of her practice that makes it look easier than it is.
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S1 · E2
May 31 · 45 min
Dr. Mamobo Ogoro // Allyship is a Verb
Ever wonder what really drives intercultural leadership? Check out this episode if you believe belonging is stronger when we actively do the work to include and uplift others. Most people think belonging is just a feeling, something we instinctively recognise. But Dr. Mamobo Ogoro reminds us: belonging is designed, shaped by intentional actions. From her childhood experiences of being othered to her groundbreaking research on migrant identities, she’s shown that belonging isn’t a given, it’s something we build, stitch into our institutions, and practice daily. Her work with GORM proves that meaningful change happens when leaders enable, equip, and elevate diverse voices, especially those often unheard. And it’s not just about corporate diversity, it's about creating a future where every child feels seen, heard, and rooted. What small action can you take today to strengthen someone’s sense of belonging? Worth thinking about.
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S1 · E1
May 24 · 1 hr 4 min
David Airey // Not Love at First Sight
David Airey has been making logos for twenty years and writing about them for seventeen. His third edition of Logo Design Love just came out, and rather than sit down and talk about what's in it, we ended up talking about what changed — in the book, in his practice, and in how he thinks about what he's actually doing when he hands a client a mark that's supposed to outlast them both. There's a moment in this conversation where David describes presenting design directions to clients in words only — no visuals, just paragraphs — before a single pixel gets drawn. And it sounds so simple when he says it. But the thinking behind it, and the years of expensive mistakes that led him there, that's what the episode is really about. We talk about the gap between what a client thinks they want and what they actually need. About the logos David preferred that the client didn't choose — and what he did with them anyway. About a landscape gardening project early in his career that went quietly sideways because he forgot to ask one question at the start. About whether working increasingly through screens and email changes the work itself, in ways that are hard to prove but impossible to ignore. And then there's the bigger question underneath all of it — what does it mean to design something enduring? Not timeless in the abstract, but actually built to carry meaning for a decade or more, through every association a customer will ever have with a brand, starting from a first impression that might be completely wrong. David is thoughtful, honest, and very good at saying things that sound simple until you sit with them for a minute. This is exactly the kind of conversation Rough Drafts was made for.
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S1 · E1
May 11 · 1 min
Rough Drafts // Where Ideas Are Still Forming
Rough Drafts – Where ideas are still forming. Most design podcasts focus on finished work: the award, the commission, the retrospective. Rough Drafts goes earlier. Each episode explores the thinking before the thinking, the first sketch, the direction that didn’t work, the moment a project changed shape. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts — or sign up for updates at bouncecreative.ie and be the first to know who's coming up next.
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