James Victore was recently called an existential cowboy, in so many words, by Print Magazine. He is a designer, an art director, an author, an activist and a teacher. He runs an independent studio hell-bent on world domination.

James likes to work on instinct and inspiration. He is the type of designer to get more kismet from a delicious meal or an adventure with family than from sitting in front of his computer. He is a spirited renegade in the world of design. His smile lights up the world from under his signature mustache.

Veerle Pieters is an outstanding, mystical designer. She started her career on her own, before photoshop and illustrator. She is a mostly self-taught enterprise with the desire of heart.

Her career began in 1992 as a one-woman business focusing on logos and print. In 1995, she added website design, user interfaces, and multimedia development to her arsenal.

Her company, Duoh! became an official legal entity in 2000, and is now the studio of Veerle and Geert Leyseele, who are partners in work and life.

Our good friend Gui Borchert is a dapper designer and art director, originally from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, now residing in Los Angeles. However, he has made interesting stops in Utah, London, and New York. He is one of the most recognizable designers in the world, and has done tremendous work for the likes of Nike, Adidas, Google, MTV, The World Cup, and even President Obama, just to name a select few.

Gui is passionate about all forms of visual communication as means to express an idea; a thought, a concept, an emotion, a message or even a visual experiment. He wields art and design as a weapon of the world, working across several mediums, including typography, photography, and illustration.

It was an honor to honor our good friend, and ask him some dumb questions. Obrigado, Keith!

Don Clark is one half of the amazing design duo, Invisible Creature, an awesome name for a firm, because designers are supposed to be invisible creatures, striking emotions from shapes and colors.

Don has always been creative, embracing his passions. He and his brother started a punk rock band in the 1990s. And in the year 2000, Don and his brother turned to design, developing album covers, posters, and logos for many of the acts they’d met through music.

Don is now a husband, a father and a farmer, still doing work on music packaging—even having earned a few Grammy nominations along the way— but that’s just part of the focus of Invisible Creature.

The creative firm’s clients include Target, Nike, Hasbro, Google, Nordstrom, The New York Times, and dozens of other heavy hitters. For Don, the coolest perk of his work is the diversity of his clients and the variety of projects, from toys to tunes.

We first found out about Harvey Shepard through his wonderfully gorgeous book, Oh Beautiful Beer, which began as a blog dedicated to his love of beer and label design. When we researched the author, we discovered that he is an awesome design ninja at heart.

He hails from Massachusetts, but now resides in Seattle. He travels a lot and he mostly tweets about baseball, but Harvey’s designs focus on creating effective and memorable solutions. He specializes in logo design, branding, web and print design. With a rich arsenal of work including musicians, breweries, agencies, clubs and events, Mr. Shepard is sure to guide us to the promise land.

So many cool things are coming out of Kansas City right now. Historically, Kansas City has always been a creative hub, with Hallmark being located there and Walt Disney being born there. Tad Carpenter is one of the coolest things coming up and out of KC.

A designer with an illustrator’s heart and an illustrator with a designer’s mind, Tad was lucky enough to grow up the son of two artists smack dab in the middle of the midwest. His father is an illustrator and has been a creative director for Hallmark Cards for nearly 40 years. His mother is a talented fiber artist.

The studio he runs with his wife, Carpenter Collective, has an overall approach to branding, strategy, and design that has garnered wonderful clients ranging from Target to Conan O’Brien, Macy’s, Coca-Cola, Ray Ban, Nick Jr, MTV and Adobe. Tad’s work has appeared in numerous publications and he has written/illustrated over a dozen children’s books. Since 2009, Tad also teaches Graphic Design at the University of Kansas, and we are so thrilled he did our ‘Dumb Questions’ over the phone while driving home.

James Flames is on fire.

He is a fantastically intricate illustrator and screenprinter with an eye for (every) detail. He was born in Brooklyn, NY to an overall artistic, big Italian family, and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His designs and artwork have been featured in galleries all over the world, as well as on beer bottles, album covers, magazines, and Marvel comic books.

He also creates gig posters for some of the top touring bands, including Phish, The Avett Brothers, Henry Rollins, and King Khan and the Shrines, just to name an eclectic few. Mr. Flames prints his posters by hand, in his studio tucked away in the woods.

We are thrilled that he set fire to our dangerously Dumb Questions.

Jessica Hische is a hand letterer and illustrator. That means she mostly draws amazingly cool letters (and words) by hand. She has done work for HBO, The Washington Post, and Starbucks, just to name a few of a few of her vast portfolio. She’s even been commissioned by the United States Postal Service, done a ton of book covers, as well as all the lettering for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

She got her start with the legendary Louise Fili, then branched out on her own to conquer every letter in the alphabet. Now, with offices in Brooklyn and San Francisco she covers a lot of ground, from A to Z. All in all, Jessica takes type design to a whole new level.

Steven Heller is as prolific as it gets in the design community. Steven has worked with Tom Wolfe, interviewed Milton Glaser; He is a luminary, forging graphic design’s archival history. And we bet you never knew whether or not he was a cat person.

He was an art director for the NY Times for 33 years. He has published over 170 books on design and popular culture. He is the co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he lectures on the history of graphic design.

Heller is the recipient of the AIGA Medal in 1999, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame Special Educators Award in 1996, The Pratt Institute Herschel Levitt Award in 2000, the 2011 National Design Award for Design Mind, and the Society of Illustrators Richard Gangel Award for Art Direction in 2006. With Heller’s cascade of books, articles, lectures, conferences, exhibitions, courses, blogs, radio essays, podcasts, and rants and raves, he labors mightily to help find a foundation under the eclectic range of activities that designers practice.

It doesn’t matter whether Mr. Heller considers himself an actual designer or not, this was a special interview.

Sara Blakely is the founder of Spanx. There isn’t a woman (or man) in this world that hasn’t heard of Spanx or thanked their lucky stars that it was invented. Just for those of you that have lived under a rock the past 10 years, Spanx is the revolutionary undergarment, that turned into a global sensation. The story of Sara’s success is all about simple innovation. With a single, disruptive design idea, she changed an entire industry and created a new product category.