A Meeting: Alex Naghavi, Seamless Studio
On resilience, creative longevity, and deliberately designing a life
Resilience is often praised, but rarely questioned.
Alex Naghavi is an award-winning Creative Director and founder exploring the evolving relationship between technology, culture, and craft. For nearly two decades, she has led brand and product work for companies including Google, Sony, Spotify, Red Bull, and RCA Records, and previously served as Executive Creative Director and Partner at global design and venture studio Josephmark, where she helped launch and grow digital ventures, including platforms later acquired by Twitter and Microsoft. Named one of the Top 50 Women AI Artists in the world, she now works in-house at Block (Cash App, Square, TIDAL), while building her AI startup, Seamless Studio. Driven by a seemingly boundless curiosity and a desire to push her work into new creative territories, Alex is exploring filmmaking and physical forms as part of her evolving creative practice.
A Meeting is a series on Working Women Agency documenting the thinking behind nonlinear, taste-led careers — through conversations with women living them.
This month’s A Meeting is with Alex — a creative director whose nearly two-decade career reveals what compounding actually looks like.
We talked about choosing ten-thousand-dollar tasks, sharing your work before you feel ready, and protecting creative flow in an era obsessed with output.
You wrote a powerful piece on resilience. What’s a clear signal that the version of “resilience” many driven women are taught is actually just suffering—and how can they recalibrate and build a relationship with resilience that genuinely feeds them?
Resilience wasn’t something I was intentionally thinking about. Word-Form is a great publication that asks creatives to reflect on a single word and write an essay on it. When they gave me my word, I must admit, I didn’t have much opinion on it. It actually took me a while to gather my thoughts and understand my relationship to this word, Resilience.
What bothered me was how clean the word sounded compared to the reality of it. Resilience is often praised, but rarely questioned. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised how unevenly it is distributed—women and minorities, in particular, are expected to have more of it, because we’ve had to carry more.
That’s when it clicked: resilience has become a branding exercise—a way to make endurance look noble instead of necessary. A way to keep systems unchanged while individuals absorb the cost.
I’d spent most of my career being very good at that. Coping. Adapting. Performing competence. But therapy made me see how much of that was just unprocessed weight. I wasn’t resolving anything—I was armouring up.
The version of resilience I believe in now is quieter and less impressive. It’s about reducing load. Naming what isn’t mine. And letting myself stop before the walls get too thick to feel anything at all.
How do you distinguish between challenges that are worth carrying and burdens that quietly erode your energy or clarity? At this stage of your career, what are you intentionally no longer optimizing for (even though it once helped you succeed)?
Earlier in my career, I optimised for speed, volume, and range. I said yes to almost everything because it built skill quickly, and I don’t regret that phase at all. In fact, I’d encourage anyone starting out to embrace that mindset. But over time, I’ve shifted toward optimising for depth, energy, and creative flow.
As I’ve gotten older, my discernment has sharpened. I trust my instincts much more now—that initial gut feeling about whether something feels aligned or creatively fulfilling is usually pretty accurate.
I’ve also become more conscious of the difference between positive friction and negative friction. Positive friction stretches you—it’s uncomfortable, but energising, and feels like growth. Negative friction drains you in a way sleep simply doesn’t fix. I recently asked a friend whether she felt physically tired or soul tired. She paused, laughed, and said, “You’re right… I’m completely energised. I’m just physically tired.” That distinction really stayed with me. One is the natural cost of doing meaningful work. The other slowly erodes your ability to show up creatively at all.
I’ve also gotten better at recognising what I call ten-thousand-dollar tasks versus ten-dollar tasks. Some tasks create real momentum and growth, while others simply keep you busy without moving anything forward. I tend to lean on AI for the smaller, repetitive work where it makes sense—it clears space so I can stay focused on the work that actually requires my perspective, taste, and energy.
At this stage of my career, I’m intentionally no longer optimising for constant output, availability, or saying yes out of obligation. I’m much more selective about where I place my time and energy—because ultimately, if I lose creative flow, the work suffers. So I protect it. Aggressively.
From the outside, your career in design appears very intentional—awards, cross-industry work, and an early focus on AI. How much of that path was deliberate strategy versus following curiosity and momentum as it unfolded?
I would say it’s been a bit of both. I’ve always prided myself on just focussing on doing good work and the rest will follow. And in a way, I believe that’s what’s happened.
I can say for certain what I had early on in my career was obsession: with people, with culture, with technology, with making things. Design became the place where those obsessions could coexist. I followed whatever pulled me forward, and became curious before others even knew what to be curious about, and then I stayed curious longer than most people stayed interested.
What I will say that has become more deliberate over time is how I design my life. I realised at some point that I was designing everything except the thing I lived inside.
AI is just another iteration of that pattern. I’ve always been an early adopter, not because I wanted to be ahead, but because I wanted to understand tools from the inside—and how I could use them as a new advantage in my creative toolkit. In a way, the title “creative technologist,” is quite apt for me, but something I’ve never necessarily felt comfortable claiming.
What I will say that has become more deliberate over time is how I design my life. I realised at some point that I was designing everything except the thing I lived inside. Once I started doing that—asking who I want to be, how I want to feel, what kind of work I want to be doing—the decisions got clearer.
Was there a specific inflection point where your career meaningfully accelerated, or did progress come from the slower compounding of relationships, rigor, and consistently strong work over time?
There were definitely several inflection points: getting my first job at JM (I actually started as an intern), leading the redesign of the Myspace platform, creatively directing the RCA Records brand refresh, winning awards, becoming a partner and Executive Creative Director, and eventually moving to LA. Each one built on the last.
But most of that growth happened quietly. I wasn’t focused on telling the story of my career publicly—I was focused on doing the work, honing my craft, and sharpening my skills. Every presentation, client conversation, case study, brand, product, leadership challenge, and new tool shaped me into the designer I am today. I wouldn’t trade that time. When you zoom out across nearly two decades, of course it was compounding. A lot of the real acceleration came from the unglamorous moments—small failures, difficult client conversations, learning how to lead, and learning how to back yourself.
Working incredibly hard does accelerate your career. But honestly? Visibility accelerates it faster.
You can be doing the most thoughtful, ambitious work in the world, but if no one sees it, it limits what can grow from it. Some of the biggest momentum shifts in my career came when I started sharing my work more intentionally—rebuilding a portfolio, expanding my network, speaking publicly, and putting myself out there. Nothing fundamentally changed, people just saw the culmination of years of work come into focus.
That’s something I tell younger designers all the time: share your work. Document it. Talk about it. It can move your career forward in ways talent alone sometimes can’t.
How do you approach building professional relationships in a way that’s genuine and long-term, rather than purely transactional—especially in competitive environments?
Most of my closest relationships started as work relationships. I’m very instinctual about people. If I admire your work, I’ll tell you. If I think we’ll gel, I’ll suggest coffee. I don’t treat relationships like transactions—I care about whether they feel real and whether they can deepen over time.
I also genuinely like helping people. I make introductions. I connect dots. I ask how I can help without expecting anything back. Over time, that creates a network that isn’t fragile—it’s reciprocal.
The most important part is following up. That’s where most people drop off.
I actually try to build this into how I work. As an example, I recently curated and organized a small work sabbatical with a handful of incredible women across creative and tech fields. It’s intentionally informal, just dedicated time to work alongside each other, share inspiration, and stay creatively energised. It’s already sparked new ideas, collaborations, and conversations, and it reinforced something I believe strongly: the best professional momentum often comes from community, not competition.
In the age of AI, beyond technical proficiency, what core human skills—cognitive, emotional, or intuitive—do you believe will define the most impactful designers over the next decade?
AI is incredibly good at pattern recognition, and we can absolutely use that to our advantage. However, the designers who will stand out are the ones pairing AI with strong skills in discernment, cultural awareness, and taste. AI can produce endless options, but it has no understanding of consequence, context, or timing.
The human advantage is lived experience. Materiality. Failure. Knowing when something feels wrong even if it technically works. That’s why designers with depth—not just speed—will always have the advantage.
It was never really about the tools. It’s always been about the experience, the thinking, the gestalt—the ability to see the whole picture and make meaning from it.
What skills or goals are you actively developing right now?
Right now, I’m learning how to choose my ideas more carefully.
For most of my career, the challenge was execution—how to bring something to life with the tools, time, and teams available. AI has removed a lot of that friction. I can prototype, direct, or build things faster than ever. The constraint is no longer can I make this? It’s is this worth making?
That shift has made me much more thoughtful about where I place my energy and attention. I’ve been leaning more into philosophy and spirituality as a way to stay centered, optimistic, and genuinely joyful in how I move through both life and work. Curiosity has always been my compass, and I’ve accepted that learning is probably going to be the through-line of my entire career. I find that incredibly comforting and energising. I love knowing that every year there will be something new I want to understand or explore.
I’m also feeling increasingly drawn toward designing work that exists beyond the screen—objects you can hold, films you can experience, work that carries weight and longevity in a different way than digital products or brands often do. I’m fascinated by creating things that live longer, both physically and culturally, and film feels like the medium I’m most drawn to as I think about my next chapter. I fully expect to be a student of film for at least the next decade, and I’m excited by the humility that comes with learning something new again.
The constraint is no longer “can I make this?” It’s “is this worth making?”
At the same time, stepping into my founder journey has been another huge learning chapter. Building something from the ground up has expanded how I think about creativity, leadership, and the courage it takes to back your own vision. It’s messy, unpredictable, and deeply fulfilling—and it’s reminded me that some of the most meaningful growth happens when you’re willing to be a beginner again. It feels like the start of another phase of my career rather than the culmination of one.
Long term, I hope my impact shows up not just through the work I make, but through the knowledge I share, the women I support, and the creative environments I help foster. I care deeply about building spaces where ambitious, thoughtful, and joyful creativity can thrive. And, of course, I want to keep making work that feels considered, emotionally resonant, and beautiful—the kind of work that makes people feel something and lasts beyond its moment.