Sam Syed: CG Visions of the Future

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.

For anyone who can remember, magazine design in the '80s and '90s was quite interesting. Neville Brody pretty much owned that first decade in England, making heads turn with The Face and Arena, then giving up his crown to California's David Carson who made waves with (our very own) Transworld Skateboarding and Beach Culture before imploding spectacularly at the now defunct Ray Gun.

Of course, I was working at the other end of the creative spectrum. Dry business and trade magazines with rigid columns of type and tiny pictures, one color printing with a color section if you were lucky, all looking like they fell off the Roger Black conveyer belt. Most of the images we could work with were given to us. You could design the page, but not the image.

Fast forward a few years and somehow I end up in New York City, 1999, right at the height of the its most recent craziness, working on Maxim and Stuff, two of the biggest men's magazine's EVER! I spent three years as the number two at Maxim and three years as the number one at Stuff. We shot everything. Our budgets were massive, our staffs were massive and our parties were many and...well...massive.

For six solid years, I went on hundreds of shoots. Fashion, still life, concept and of course celebrity. We flew to LA all the time, stayed in exclusive hotels and hobnobbed with stars (everyone in LA is a star). We hired huge teams of highly strung creative talent who need a lot of managing and babying. We worked with arrogant (and some not so arrogant) publicists, concepting shoots which took place in unbelievable hollywood houses and cool downtown studios. And of course, there were the stars, the strangest people of all. It was a huge buzz, but by the end of it I never wanted to go on a shoot again.

Then I moved to Popular Science. I got the job, in part, by pitching a redesign concept which, among other things, used CG, computer generated images to create a branded "look". It's true, they were using it before, but not as the foundation on which "the look" was based.

I didn't have much experience working in the medium, but as a big fan of animation I had seen a lot around. It is a look which immediately references science fiction, comics, movies and video games, a kind of futuristic dreamscape in which I could wrap the Popular Science package.

Unlike photo shoots, which are bound by the laws of physics, stopwatches and budgets, with CG, you can create pretty much anything you can imagine.

CG images, being complex and time consuming, do present some unique challenges and need careful planning and preparation. You are basically making a three dimensional virtual model within your software. Once created, the model can be manipulated for angle and every visual parameter you care to change. Which gives us designers an enormous level of control, far more than a photo shoot could ever deliver, but also requires a correspondingly large amount of care.

It all starts with composition. You really need to figure this out so that the CG artist can understand what you want and have an idea of all the stuff they will have to make. If you plan the whole page/spread, you can integrate the image with other layout elements like headlines and deks.

Next you will need a lot of information. CG artists don't like to do things "by eye". They want data points for physical parameters, so if you're making an object you'll need engineering plans if you can get them, and other reference material. This will help determine all the basic shapes and keep accuracy in relative size.

Once the model is complete you will need to add surface textures. Which usually means finding lots of visual reference of the kind of textures you're after, as well as other detailing you might like or need. Believe me, you'll spend a lot of evenings on Google images!

The last, and probably hardest stage, is lighting. One of the reasons I'm attracted to CG is that it can emulate studio lighting. You can even add this kind of light to "outside" images, giving them a cool hyper-real look. This level of skill requires an artist with the eye of a photographer, someone who really sees light and how it falls and interacts with physical material. I call it the "magic eye".

I have been lucky enough to work with some astonishing creatives in this field. The best of these is our cover artist Nick Kaloterakis, one of the most talented people I know, and someone I am proud to call a good friend, even though he lives in Sydney Australia and we have never met face-to-face.

Together, we have created some of the best work in my portfolio. How lucky I am!

Here are a few samples of work done with Nick and other artists. The sketches are mine.

If you have any questions or comments I would be happy to answer them.