Life At Bonnier - Sam Syed

Sam Syed: Redefining the Magazine Experience

By Ganda Suthivarakom on 2009-03-06
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A Week in the Life: Popular Science's Creative Director on the digital future of the magazine.

I first met my good friend Matthias in the summer of 1996. I had just quit my excellent job as Art Editor of Hi-Fi Choice Magazine (doesn't sound like much but we always had about ten grand's worth of cutting edge audio equipment lying around, so if you liked music it had its perks) and was looking for a regular freelance gig to finance my partying lifestyle. I ended up at a company called Haymarket, pretty big by English standards, doing a stint on a newish magazine called F1-Racing.

Sam Syed: Design Principles

By Sam Syed on 2009-03-05
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A Week in the Life: Sam Syed on design principles used in Popular Science.

Sam Syed: Infographics

By Sam Syed on 2009-03-04
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A Week in the Life: "We Love Infographics," says Sam Syed, Creative Director of Popular Science.

Photo courtesy of Sam Syed

For most magazine professionals, stories take on a very similar form: columns of text accompanied by images which "illustrate" certain things.

Layouts usually work like this: opening double page picture (if you're working on a feature) with a head and dek, then the story snakes through subsequent pages, each with one or more images, hopefully appearing on the same page they are mentioned.

This simple seeming formula is the mainstay of magazine narrative construction.

Sam Syed: CG Visions of the Future

By Sam Syed on 2009-03-04
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A Week in the Life: Sam Syed went from documentary filmmaker to designer.

photo courtesy of Sam Syed

Oddly, I am not trained as a designer but as a journalist (documentary TV), and found my way into this interesting and fun line of work by accident.

The first design project I worked on was the first Time Out Film Book, for which, by chance, I had also done some editorial work. It was about 600 pages of tightly-fitting type with a few pictures thrown in here and there. A bit like laying out out a phone book, but I loved it.

From there I graduated to magazines.

Meet Sam Syed

By Sam Syed on 2009-03-03
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"A Week in the Life": How an ex-journalist became the PopSci Media Group Creative Director.

First let me introduce myself. My name is Sam Syed, Creative Director of Popular Science, or more specifically, the PopSci Media Group, since these days we all need to work on as many projects as possible. Although I'm an Indian-born Brit, I have spent the last decade here in the United States. While my earlier years were characterized by a love of "partying" and getting "wasted", I am now happily married and live in the 'burbs outside New York with my lovely wife and two cute kids (one pictured).