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.

Josh Brewer is a busy man. He is a designer, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a mentor, a musician, a husband and a father.

Mr. Brewer was Principal Designer at Twitter, co-creator of 52 Weeks Of UX and Ffffallback, as well as the Director of User Experience for Socialcast, which was acquired by VMware in 2011.

If he isn’t consulting on new ideas and new businesses, he is shaping the future somehow. He was one of the first designers to agree to our dumb questions, and we were lucky enough to catch Josh on the hook, and get him to take part in our funny little game. We can’t thank him enough for his expertise and his patience.

When compiling our list of people we want to interview, there are always a few names we never think will answer, either because they are super famous or super busy, or both. Ashleigh Axios agreed to do our ‘Dumb Questions’, demonstrating that designers are a strong, affable community, and that Axios herself is one of its biggest proponents.

Imagine trying to please both the Federal Government and the American people. Essentially that is what Ashleigh does, proving design is a carefully constructed tool, and she wields it with both strength and humility.

Needless to say, she has a lot on her plate. After all, she is the Creative Director of the White House. The freaking White House! Axios is a designer, a maker, a wife, as well as the President of AIGA’s Washington DC chapter.

In the spirit of powerful design, we cut through some actual, tangible red tape for this one, and her answers are brilliant, insightful, funny, smart and impressive. We are glad design in politics is proving its value and growing in importance. Thanks, Ashleigh.

Matthew Manos wants to change the way businesses do business. Manos is the Founder and Managing Director of verynice, a global design-strategy consultancy that ignites movements, builds brands, and challenges perspectives. verynice has a very unique business model; the company gives half of their work and time away for free to nonprofit clients.

Jean Jullien is arguably the most famous artist in the world right now. His ‘Peace for Paris’ has become a worldwide symbol of support.

Mostly, Jullien’s work tends to have a light and breezy, sometimes on-the-nose humor. He has made a habit of reacting to the news in drawings before, from the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson to the legalization of gay marriage in Ireland and even the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris last january, but a simple, slightly off-kilter rendering of the Eiffel Tower framed by a circle so as to look like a peace sign has taken the world by pacifistic storm.

Bradford Shellhammer is a colorful badass. He has been named one of the ‘100 Most Creative People in Business’ by Fast Company, coined the ‘King of Quirk’ by Forbes Magazine, and the ‘Eames of E-Commerce’ by USA Today.

As chief design officer of Fab, the design-obsessed flash-sale site he co-founded in 2011, Shellhammer was instrumental in changing the way online consumers shop and navigate. In March of this year, Shellhammer launched Bezar, the definitive marketplace for design. It is a way for designers to sell directly to consumers. This isn’t Fab 2.0, this is much more intricate with a sharp eye for detail, personal taste, and just simply making items accessible to everyone, like Ikea.

It was an absolute blast to interview Mr. Shellhammer. Here are his smart answers to our dumb questions.