Known primarily for being the Mercedes-Benz designer who penned the now iconic SLS AMG, Mark Fetherston originally comes from an art background, not automotive design.
He is now one of the most prodigious three-pointed star designers in recent years, having penned the SL (R231), the B-Class (W246), the A-Class (W176) and the focus of the following interview, the CLA (C117).
Though sprinkled with the marketing wooden language that official manufacturer videos usually have, the following video is a rather nice introduction to Mark Fetherston's mind and how he became the great car designer that he is today.
Overall, he seem like the type of person who would always have a nice background story to tell and he's not always hiding behind marketing dribble, like Robert Lesnik did, for example.
Whether you're a fan of the Mercedes-Benz CLA's design or not, you have to admit that considering the restrictions imposed by the car's platform, shrinking the CLS' design and also adding its own stylistic details could have been a disaster and yet it's definitely not. We're not actually fans of its long front overhang, for example, but that was obviously not a design but an engineering pre-requisite.
Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project. Full profile
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