Kerning from the best — 5 minutes with Jamie Syke

Luis Ouriach

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8px Magazine

3 min readJun 25, 2019

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Kerning From the Best is an article series where I’m having quick chats with remote designers from around the world to learn more about what makes them tick.

This month’s is the prolific Jamie Syke, who’s worked on some of the biggest tech startups in the industry over the past ten years. He’s currently building his own product, Pyrismic, which aims to connect world-class remote talent with growing companies in 24 hours or less.

Enjoy.

What does a typical morning look like for you?

I don’t set an alarm, I don’t like mornings and never have. I usually wake up between 8 and 10 depending on how late I was awake the day before, and typically dedicate the mornings to personal time.
This can cover any range of activities from:
Listening to Audiobooks — I usually balance a mix of fiction and reference.
Reading articles, or generally looking around the internet for cool stuff.
Generally relaxing / thinking time.
It usually does not include:
Emails, meetings, calls or any interaction with other human beings.
That’s for the afternoons and evenings.
Just what works best for me. Everyone is different.

How did you arrive here?

It all began back in the dizzying days of MySpace (remember that?), I helped “models” airbrush photos and bands design their pages. Because of this, I always found myself in Photoshop and long story short: I dropped out of a design course to work remotely with Zynga, that led to many more freelance projects before I met up with Cassius Kiani and Fabio Basile to found Brotherhood back in 2014.
At Brotherhood, we worked on some incredible projects for companies like Bumble, Samsung, Porsche, GoDaddy, Bear and more. It was a formative time for the three of us, but after several years of success we went our separate ways to work on our own things.
After Brotherhood, I spent a little time with the well-renowned MetaLab team, helping them execute successful projects for Google, Zoom, MediMap, Sean Parker, and a couple more.
Recently, I’ve been working on freelancing for exciting and innovative seed and series A companies, alongside building Pyrismic, and a few other things I’ll reveal soon.

What do you find yourself having to repeatedly convince others of?

Everything is better with hot sauce.

Do you have a mantra?

Question everything.

Where do you want to go?

I legitimately am unsure how to answer this. I have a lot of varied goals and aspirations, and what I want to achieve on a month-to-month basis can change a lot.
I’ll just say I want to do everything I can to live a life I enjoy.

Who do you look up to?

I look up to my close friends. And anyone who gives a fuck and works to do what they love.

What’s your remote setup?

A 15” Retina Macbook Pro, some iPad Pro (the small one, first gen), and an iPhone XS Max. I recently wrote about the apps I use in detail if you’d like to learn more about my process.

Thank you for following this new series. As always, I’m curious to hear your feedback.

As well as this, if you’re a remote worker, get in touch; it’d be great to feature as many varied designers as possible.

Follow 8px Magazine for all future articles & interviews.

A selection of our other interviews: