Neville Brody discusses his inspirations and challenges past, present and future in four chapters. His work as a graphic designer, typographer and art director over the last 30 years has broken boundaries; influenced how we view messaging in many walks of life and is work that will continue to provide inspiration for generations to come.

A serie of four video interviews on inspiration, challenges, leaving your mark, and on the future. Part of the Blank Sheet Project by ArjoWiggings Creative Papers that focuses on renown creatives who share the way they approach a blank sheet of paper. They talk about the whole process of creativity, from inspiration to finished idea. They nominate the pieces of work that they would leave behind for future generations, and also discuss their own views on the role of paper today, the future of the creative industry and the responsibility of creatives to be ever more innovative, thoughtful and sustainable.

The Dutch graphic designers MAUREEN MOOREN (1969-) and DANIEL VAN DER VELDEN (1971-) are in the vanguard of experiments to define a new approach to graphic design, which is both more appropriate and effective at a time when society is overloaded with visual information.

The transformation of our lives since the early 1990s by communications technology and global networks has profound implications for the role of graphic design, according to the Dutch designers Maureen Mooren and Daniel van der Velden. Believing that the traditional notion of the straightforward graphic solution is no longer relevant, they are committed to developing new ways in which graphic design reflects the eclecticism and confusion of a society overloaded with information.

Since meeting as students at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam during the mid-1990s and opening their studio in 1998 in Amsterdam, Mooren, born in Dordrecht in 1969, and Van der Velden, born in Rotterdam in 1971, have developed a series of responses to this scenario. In 2001 they redesigned the architectural magazine Archis, introducing provocative editorial and visual strategies that referenced other magazines.

Mooren and van der Velden’s design of the identity for the annual Holland Festival in 2005 addresses political and social instability in the Netherlands through the introduction of what they describe as: “an assertive yet ambiguous motif, something between an H, the silhouette of a building and a cross”.

Interview at the London Design Museum.

With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.

The tag “rock star” is recklessly applied to everyone from bloggers to biochemists, but in Paula Scher’s case it couldn’t be more appropriate. As a rock star designer, she’s cooked up everything from Boston album covers to Elvis Costello posters, pausing somewhere in between to trash the ubiquitous visual authoritarianism of Helvetica. She’s also created some of design’s most iconic images, like the Citibank logo. She is a partner in the renowned design firm Pentagram, and in 2001 received the distinguished AIGA medal.

As a fine artist, Scher has also become increasingly well known for her microscopically detailed map paintings, densely latticed with hand-lettered text, that evoke not only place but the varied political, historical and cultural meanings (and preconceptions) brought to the world by the viewer.

Interview with Ian Coyle: known for his work for Nike, his collaborations with Duane King, and Thinking For A Living. Find out about his thinking and process, and what went into his new personal website

Ian Coyle is a creative director, designer, and interaction developer living in Portland, Oregon. With Duane King, he runs Huge/KingCoyle, an innovation lab focused on design, culture, and craft.

At TED1998, the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From here, he muses on what makes a convincing poster: the act of breaking down an idea and making it new. Recorded Monterey 1998 in Monterey, California. Duration: 15:14.

Milton Glaser’s work is easy to spot in a lineup — it’s simple, direct and clear, while leaping over conceptual boundaries, so that his work connects directly to the viewer like a happy virus. His best-known work may be the I [heart] N Y logo — an image so ubiquitous, it’s hard to believe there was a time when it didn’t exist.

Glaser’s other well-known work includes a cache of posters that defined the style of the ’60s and early ’70s, and numerous logos, including such instantly familiar identities as Barron’s and the Brooklyn Brewery. He is a co-founder of New York magazine and helped set that magazine’s honest and irreverent tone.

Recently he’s been exploring the space where paintings and graphic design meet. A show in 2007 celebrated his explorations of Piero della Francesca’s work. The 2009 film To Inform and Delight: The World of Milton Glaser tells the story of his celebrated career.

Designer Tibor Kalman likes computers.They give individuals the power to fuck things up.

If, as Mickey Knox once quipped, media is like the weather, only man-made, then Tibor Kalman is a man for all seasons. Kalman has excelled as a magazine editor (Colors), an art director (Artforum), a creative director (Interview), and an industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co) whose clients included Chiat/Day, Jenny Holzer, MTV, MOMA, Talking Heads, and New York’s 42nd Street Development Project. Born in Budapest, Kalman emigrated to the US in 1956 at age 7. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, interviewed Timothy Leary for his high school newspaper, and left New York University for Cuba in 1970 to cut sugarcane in the Ten Million Ton Harvest. Recruited by Oliverio Toscani, Kalman launched Colors in 1991 in New York but two years later moved his family to Rome to continue working on the magazine. In 1995, he quit Colors and returned to New York, where he continued to brood over how to make a truly international magazine. His magazine idea is so intriguing, Wired may collaborate with him on it. A 1996 interview with Wired Magazine

As creative director at the influential design and innovation company Ideo, Paul Bennett manages to keep his eye on the little things that matter, though his clients are among the biggest in the world (Procter & Gamble and Pepsi, to name but two). “Small is the new big,”Bennett says. And his design approach reflects this philosophy. For often, it’s not the biggest ideas that have the most impact, but the small, the personal, and the intimate.

Trained as a graphic designer, Bennett is a pragmatic design evangelist, preaching fervently that design can make the world a better place, and providing playful, inspired examples of how it does.

Paul Bennett reminds us that design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life, the obvious, the overlooked.

Is it an exaggeration to say that he’s one of the unsung heroes of digital type design? Whenever you read texts on a digital device, chances are you’re looking at a font he’s had a hand in, such as Microsoft’s versions of Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New. Having led the California office of Monotype Imaging in the 1990s, he became a founding partner of Ascender Corp in 2005 and, as their chief type designer, created a huge range of functional type families including the Droid fonts for Google. He rejoined Monotype when they acquired Ascender in late 2010 and recently published the wonderful Massif Pro typeface. While he excels in making useful digital type, he is by no means a pallid geek: he balances supple curves with steep slopes, and nodes with knots-per-hour. No ODS for Steve Matteson, our man at the top.

Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery – for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.

David Carson is the “grunge typographer” whose magazine Ray Gun helped explode the possibilities of text on a page.

“You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.”

By the end of 2009 Émigré No. 70: The Look Back Issue appeared. The book, edited by Émigré co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans and published by Gingko Press, features all the eye-popping magazine covers, plus essays and interviews from The Designers Republic, Allen Hori, Rick Valicenti, Vaughan Oliver, Mr. Keedy, Lorraine Wild and others.

VanderLans compares the late 20th century’s computer-inspired design movement to “punk music in the ’70s and ’80s.” “Punk was a direct reaction to glam/stadium rock (Bowie/Roxie Music, etc.),” he told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “Did it change music? Not really. Glam rock is still being made. But punk added something to the mix. It expanded our idea of what music was, and how it could be recorded, performed and distributed. I think that’s the legacy of design of the ’90s. We reacted to an institutionalized Modernism that had gone stale.”

VanderLans talks about DIY design, the punk-rock aesthetic and the game-changing Apple Macintosh in the interview below.