Susan Kare: an Iconic Career

Susan Kare is the artist and graphic designer famous for creating icons and typefaces for, arguably, the best-known computer in the world

There was a time, not too long ago, when computers were the domain of programmers alone. When the machines eventually made the transition to our own homes, they needed to become accessible and easy to use. They needed a new visual language to be understood by the masses.

Every day we come across hundreds of icons and designs on our computers and cell phones, and we’ve built quite an expectation for high definition graphics on our devices. Let’s learn how this came about.

In 1984, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh Apple II computer to the world. He wanted it to be an accessible and useful machine. Susan Kare was the young artist in his team who used ingenuity and skill to create beautifully simple and effective symbols that helped navigate the desktop and interact with this wonderful new machine.

Read on as we look back at Susan Kare’s impressive career from a young graphic designer in Steve Jobs’ team to having a place in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

Beginnings

In 1982, Susan Kare, (born in Ithaca, New York, in 1954) was an Art Ph.D. working at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco when her old friend Andy Hertzfeld told her about the opportunity to join a team of interface developers at Apple.

With no experience in the field (as no one had back then), Susan armed herself with typography books to take to the interview to look the part. Her lack of computer knowledge worked to her advantage. The brief for the Apple Mac was that anyone should be able to use it without the need for a manual. The team set off to create a revolutionary way to interact with a computer through point and click.

Inspiration

Susan needed to create icons that were friendly, relatable, clear, concise, and memorable. She drew her inspiration from many sources, such as art history, hieroglyphics, mosaics, and gadgets. Her mother had kept Susan occupied with arts and crafts when she was a child. Embroidery and needlework were a perfect analog version of the digital bitmap. Susan transferred cross-stitch style designs from graph paper and recreated icons and type on the pixel screen.

Susan also used a book of symbols for inspiration. She came across a quirky symbol from Swedish road signage indicating ‘a place of interest’ and used it for the Command icon.

Pixel art pioneer

Having to work on a medium that presented several constraints—pixel 72 by 72 bits—, Susan worked with these constraints and limitations and became a pioneer in pixel art. Her best-known Happy Mac icon welcomed users with a smile as they waited for the operating system to load all over the world.

One of her Cairo typeface characters, Clarus the Dogcow, has a cult following and is the best-seller of her online prints site. Updated versions of her original symbols for drawing applications, such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket, are still used in Graphic design programs every day.

Typeface

Susan designed the Geneva, New York, and Monaco typefaces, and most notably the classic Chicago typeface, which was part of Apple’s brand identity until 1997 and used in four generations of the Apple iPod interface.

After Apple

Susan Kare continued her fruitful career after leaving Apple and worked for Microsoft 3.0. With the advent of color, she created the designs for Windows Solitaire, described as ‘the most popular procrastination online tool before social media’.

Later, she joined the Facebook team and was in charge of designing the very popular 64x64 Virtual Gifts. Since 2015, she has been head of Product Design at Pinterest, creating a graphical language for the popular ‘pinning’ community.

In 2015, The Museum Of Modern Art acquired and displayed Susan’s preliminary studies for the Graphic User Interface icons.

With such pioneering and (pun not intended) iconic career, it is no surprise that Susan Kare received the American Institute of Graphic Arts medal in 2018, and was awarded the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement In October 2019.

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