Alex Mahernia: Executive Creative Director
Alex pursued becoming a doctor until he realized that blood makes him faint and that he can’t stand the smell of dissected frogs. Instead, he was much more interested in drawing cells and amebas to the point that he stopped listening to the lectures and just filled his notebooks with doodles. To many family members’ disappointment, Alex changed career ambitions and went to a fine arts school in Stockholm, Sweden. After 2 years of intense cigarette smoking, oil painting and living Starving Artist 101, he decided to leave the school (with a degree) due to differences of opinion regarding surrealism versus abstractism.
After art school, Alex worked for a variety of design agencies in Stockholm until he was fired one cold day in December 1994, as he tried to install Photoshop on a virus-infected Mac 2 SE and realized that the agency had an illegal copy and no installation disks. Within 4 weeks of this incident, he took the SAT test and moved to sunny Santa Barbara, CA where he earned degrees in multimedia arts and technology, graphic design and graphic business management within 3 years.
Alex entered the job market and was employed by a variety of institutions, such as Disney, Kinko’s and a few other Web companies in Southern California. In 1998, he co-founded WebThink International, which was sold to Web Associates in 1999. Ever since then, his Creative Team has painfully endured listening to him sing 80s tunes from his office while watching Family Guy and playing old school computer games, such as Battlefield 1942.
Alex is passionate about the work produced at WA and often speaks of the company’s commitment to excellence, extreme attention to the smallest details, innovative thinking and accountability to peers and clients. He also evangelizes the fact that WA is a retention-based company, supported by long-term client relationships and the low turnover within the Creative Team across various locations.
While managing several departments and various disciplines at WA (Interface Design, Video/Interactive, Web Production and Information Architecture), Alex is a true believer that simplistic design will always prevail and that technology needs to be a transparent layer to facilitate successful UI experiences as the era of handheld and desktop convergence approaches.
Alex also enjoys late night Cartoon Network, Batman comics, geeky sci-fi shows and an occasional bottle of Southern Comfort.
To hear an interview with Alex, click here.
