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SUSAN KARE FANPAGE

Susan Kare is best known as the designer of the graphic user interface for the first Apple Macintosh computer and haver of awesome hair. She designed the original set of Mac fonts including Chicago, the font this text is written in, and Cairo, the progenitor of Wingdings.

A quick history lesson: In the mid-eighties, Apple wanted to initiate a switch from the command-line interface to the graphical user interface in their new line of personal computers so that normal people who weren't computer experts could use them. In 1982, Andy Hertzfeld from the Macintosh design team contacted Kare to design some icons and font elements for these computers. She had no experience in computer graphics but used her knowledge of the fine arts as inspiration for her designs.

She talks about her design philosophy in this article. Her work with Apple was focused on making the GUI look friendly and approachable, but more broadly, she's talked about her approach to designing icons and emphasizes their need to be memorable, meaningful, and clear.

My favorite of her stuff is the set of 32x32 pixels she designed for Apple. I think restraint makes for really creative art. In the absence of color and much room for detail, Kare came up with a lot of clever but intuitive visual metaphors to communicate the functions of whatever button she was designing an icon for. The drawings themselves are simple and functional, but the thought process behind each of them was full of personality.

Here is her Wikipedia article if you'd like to read more about her. My favorite detail is that she was welding a life-sized razorback hog sculpture when she got the call from Apple.

In 2015, Kare donated her original graph paper icon sketches to the MoMA for the exhibition This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good. You can view a selection of pages on the MoMA website here. I somehow ended up with a different set of images of this exhibit from those on the website. Here they are:

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