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Apr 19, 2018 · Alexandra Lange writes on Susan Kare, who designed the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionary—a computer that you could communicate with in pictures.
Susan Kare designed pictorial symbols that enabled non-technical users to operate a computer, a great contrast to previous screens with “command line” interfaces that required knowing code.
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- Acing The Interview
- Icon Design
- Fonts, Typefaces, and Digital Art
- Notes
In 1982, Kare was living in the Bay Area and working as a sculptor. She was working on a commission—“welding a life-size razorback hog” for an Arkansas museum—when she received a phone call from Andy Hertzfeld, an old high school classmate from the Philadelphia suburbs. Hertzfeld worked at Apple Computer in Cupertino; he had been recruited by co-fo...
When Kare joined Apple in January 1983, Hertzfeld tasked her with designing the icons and typefaces for the Mac’s operating system and applications such as MacPaint. The Macintosh featured a bit-mapped display in which each point of light, or pixel, on the screen was individually controlled by a single bit of data. Creating graphics was simply a ma...
Kare also created a family of new proportional fonts for the Macintosh. At the time, most digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that narrow and broad characters alike (e.g., both "I" and "M") used the same amount of on-screen space. Typeface design imposed even more rigorous constraints than the icons. "Each letter had to fit in a space of jus...
1 Alexandra Lange, “The Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile,” The New Yorker, 19 April 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-woman-who-gave-the-macintosh-a-smile, accessed 30 April 2018. 2 Quotation from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “Interview with Susan Kare,” conducted 8 September 2000, Making the Macintosh project, Stanford Uni...
Oct 15, 2019 · In the early 1980s, Apple asked a young artist named Susan Kare to design some graphics for its forthcoming personal computer, the Macintosh.
- Sarah Todd
Dec 25, 2011 · The Happy Mac is alive and well in icon designer Susan Kare's new book. A recent neuroimaging experiment apparently showed that the sounds an iPhone makes can trigger feelings of love in the...
Apr 24, 2013 · Kare's 2011 book Icons highlights almost 30 years of computer icon design. Her smiling classic Mac image was inspired by the ubiquitous round smiley face.
Sep 10, 2022 · Kare designed the graphic user interface icons for Apple during the early years of the company. Her process is documented in graph-paper sketchbooks.
