The “happy Mac” icon on an Apple Macintosh 128K.
Almost everyone in the world knows who Steve Jobs was, many possibly know Jony Ive, the man behind many among the most iconic designs by Apple, but probably only a few have heard of Susan Kare.
Yet, without her, Apple would not be the mega-corporation it is today, perhaps.
Indeed, Susan Kare is the designer who created much of the graphical interface of the original Macintosh in the early 1980s and that, through it, changed graphic design forever. And her history, in the context of the pioneer era of the digital culture, really deserves to be told too.
Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1954, Kare began working as a traditional, “analog” graphic designer at the end of the 1970s, after graduating from the New York University.
Her career changed abruptly in 1982 when she accepted the request by an old friend – Andy Hertzfeld, a software engineer at Apple at the time – to work on the graphic interface of Apple’s new computer, the Macintosh.
Photo: Fast Company/Susan Kare There’s no more famous name in computer icon design than Susan Kare, who remains best known for creating the famous icons for the original Macintosh. From the friendly smiling startup icon to the dreaded bomb icon (signalling a fatal system error), it was the graphics that brought early Macintosh computers to life and set them apart from text-based PCs. But few Mac users computing in the 1980s knew at the time how much of their visual experience traced back to one woman: Susan Kare.
When Kare started working on the commission, a problem emerged from the very beginning.
How to design graphic elements to be displayed on a computer screen consisting of some thousands of small squared, either black or white, called pixels, using only paper and pencils? How to verify what the final result would be on a cathode-ray tube, a device so different from the hand-painted sheets and high-resolution typographic prints she was accustomed to?
Susan Kare Mac Icons List
It must be kept in mind that there were no digital graphic editors and desktop publishing programs at the time, the first ones would be created for the computer Susan Kare was working on, indeed.
Her solution was to buy a grid-lined sketchbook through which to simulate the pixel grid of a computer display. Later, Apple gave her a prototype of the Macintosh with a preliminary version of the MacPaint graphic editor. In a way, graphics for computers and computers for graphics were being born at the same time; and the first digital graphic designers were being born together with them.
The grid-lined sketchbook on which Susan Kare designed some of the icons of the original Mac Operating System. Image courtesy of MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art.
Images Susan Kare / Kareprints.com
For the original Macintosh OS, Susan Kare created various graphic elements, many of which totally groundbreaking. The first ones were the icons.
Those designed by Kare were not the first ones to appear on a computer screen, they were preceded by the icon devised by Xerox and those of the Apple Lisa; yet hers were something completely different. While the icons of the Lisa were serious and “institutional”, the Macintosh’s ones were funny and ironic. The system crashed unrecoverably? The symbol of a bomb pops out. Do you want to save a file? To click on the icon of a small floppy disk is what you need.
Overall, the goal was to connect both acts and abstract concepts to symbols that had to be easy, intuitive, unambiguous, and understandable by people of different cultural and social backgrounds across all over the world.
To achieve that, Kare took inspiration from the most various sources. The “command” symbol mimics the road sign symbol that in Sweden indicates a tourist attraction (which actually is a stylized plan of the Borgholm castle), the icon to fill an area with a color is a tiny paint bucket, the MacPaint welcome screen shows a pixel-art version of a woodblock print by Japanese artist Hashiguchi Goyo that Kare saw in Steve Job’s home, and so on.
Yet, the most famous icon is arguably that of the “happy Mac”, the smiling little computer that greeted the user when the Mac startup hardware test was completed successfully. Its counterpart also existed, it was the “unhappy (or sad) Mac” which appeared when the bootup failed.
Susan Kare is a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. She has designed thousands of software icons that are familiar to anyone who uses a computer. The Museum of Modern Art in New York praised Kare’s designs for being able to “communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”. #studio64podcasts #socialtechpioneersSocial Tech Pioneers: Susan Kare Apple Mac Icon Designer Tribute Supertramp Dreamer: https://www.youtube.com/w.
The famous “bomb” icon, which appeared during a system crash of the original Macintosh OS.
The design of the command key symbol proved particularly difficult since it didn’t represent a specific action but a very subtle concept with no physical equivalent in real life. Kare solved the puzzle by redesigning a symbol that recalled her that of a four-leaf clover, she found on a book, but that was actually the Swedish road sign for tourist attractions. The photo on the right is by Margaret Shear.
Steve Jobs in an old Apple advertisement, the MacPaint welcome screen designed by Kare, and the Kamisuki (Combing the hair) woodblock print by Hashiguchi Goyo (1920, detail).
The happy Mac and sad Mac icons, the “sock and buskin” of the digital age.
But Kare’s work went beyond icons, she developed also the system’s fonts, including the famous Chicago typeface which had been the default on Apple computers for nearly fifteen years. Most of them were proportionally spaced fonts, much more elegant and easy to read than the monospaced fonts in vogue at the time. Again, it was necessary to design the fonts from scratch on graph paper and making the most of the few pixels available on the small display of the Macintosh 128K.
The Chicago sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare, 1984.
Susan Kare’s work for the original Mac really subverted the graphic design of the time and laid the foundations of pixel art. Her playful and open-minded creativity contributed to transforming the boring, utilitarian computer-generated graphics of the late 70s into the flamboyant universe of digital images we have today.
After Apple, Susan Kare followed Steve Jobs to his NEXT project, and then she designed for Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and other American tech companies. Probably not all know that the graphic interface of the hypnotic solitaire game included in many of the early versions of Windows was designed by her. Today, Susan Kare conducts her freelance designer office and also owns an atelier of limited-edition fine art prints (https://kareprints.com).
Susan Kare at her desk at Apple Inc., 1984. Photo © Norman Seeff courtesy of Smithsonian Museum of American History.
Visionary computer design of the past
Hand Painted Pirate Flag
Each flag is a hand-painted (acrylic paint on a black canvas flag with grommets) re-creation of the flag that flew over Bandley 3, the Macintosh building at Apple, Inc. in 1983. Susan Kare painted the original in response to one of Steve Job’s slogans at a Macintosh offsite: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.”
DetailsGift Card
Need a perfect gift for the geek, colleague, loved one, or Mac aficionado in your life? A Kare Prints digital gift card let's them choose their favorite icon print. Gift cards are available in multiple denominations and never expire.
MORE INFOHand Painted Japanese Woodcut Print
Each Japanese woodcut print is hand-painted in watercolor (primarily in a combination of blues and greens) by Susan Kare; each is a unique original. The black and white image appeared on the Apple MacPaint box in 1984, and the woodcut is shown within the MacPaint interface.
OrderAbout Susan Kare
Susan Kare is a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, the San Francisco-based designer has designed thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Designed on a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their functions immediately and memorably.
The prints in these editions feature some of her best-known and favorite icons.
BIOCairo Throw
The original emoji, Cairo was a typeface designed by Susan Kare in 1984 for the first Macintosh operating system. Kare designed this woven blanket for the Jacquard loom, an early example of computer-controlled machinery, operated with punched cards and invented by Joseph Jacquard in 1801.
Susan Kare Fonts
Since 2014, Susan Kare has collaborated with Areaware on a variety of products such as this unique throw, bitmap textiles and solitaire cards.
DetailsSusan Kare Mac Icons
- Susan Kare Apple