Susan Kare
Template:Short description Template:Infobox person
Susan Kare (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell; born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer from 1983 to 1986.<ref name="Design Biography">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She was employee #10 and creative director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She has worked as a design consultant to Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Facebook, and Pinterest. Template:Asof, Kare is employed at Niantic Labs.<ref name="sjm">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> As a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant designers of modern technology.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="MICG-2022" />
Early life and education
Kare was born in Ithaca, New York. Her father was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research facility for the senses of taste and smell.<ref name="Regional">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Her mother taught her counted-thread embroidery<ref name="How Susan">Template:Cite magazine</ref> as she immersed herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/> Her brother was aerospace engineer Jordin Kare.<ref name="hom_su">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }} </ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She graduated from Harriton High School in 1971. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, with an undergraduate honors thesis on mathematicsTemplate:Citation needed. She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University in 1978 with a doctoral dissertation on "the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honoré Daumier and Claes Oldenburg". Her goal was "to be either a fine artist or teacher".<ref name="hom_su"/><ref name="I.D. Forty"/>
Career
Early
Susan Kare's career has always focused on fine art.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> For several summers during high school she interned at the Franklin Institute for designer Harry Loucks, who introduced her to typography and graphic design while she did phototypesetting with "strips of type for labels in a dark room on a PhotoTypositor".<ref name="2019 NDA"/><ref name="Designboom">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Kare AIGA">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Because she did not attend an artist training school, she built her experience and portfolio by taking many pro-bono graphics jobs such as posters and brochure design in college, holiday cards, and invitations.<ref name="Designboom"/><ref name="2019 NDA"/> After her Ph.D., she moved to San Francisco to work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF),<ref name="hom_su" /><ref name="Tobin">Template:Cite journal</ref> as sculptor<ref name="Iconic Designer">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and occasional curator.<ref name="Macintosh Smile"/> She later reflected that her "ideal life would be to make art full-time but that sculpture was too solitary".<ref name="hom_su"/>
Apple
In 1982, Kare was welding a life-sized razorback hog sculpture commissioned by an Arkansas museum when she received a phone call from high school friend Andy Hertzfeld. In exchange for an Apple II computer, he solicited her to hand-draw a few icons and font elements to inspire the upcoming Macintosh computer.<ref name="hom_su"/><ref name="Kare Engadget">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> However, she had no experience in computer graphics and "didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface" or pixel art<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> so she drew heavily upon her fine art experience in mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/><ref name="How Susan"/> He suggested that she get a Template:US$ grid notebook<ref name="How Susan"/><ref name="Celebrating"/> of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto<ref name="The Sketchbook">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and mock up several Template:Nowrap representations of his software commands and applications.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> This includes an icon of scissors for the "cut" command, a finger for "paste", and a paintbrush for MacPaint.<ref name="Macintosh Smile"/><ref name="Iconic Designer"/> Compelled to actually join the team for a fixed-length part-time job,<ref name="hom_su"/> she interviewed "totally green" but undaunted, bringing a variety of typography books from the Palo Alto public library to show her interest<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> alongside her well-prepared notebook.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/><ref name="Mac OS Icon sketchbook">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She "aced" the interview<ref name="Iconic Designer"/><ref name="sjm" /><ref name="Tobin" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and was hired in January 1983 with Badge #3978.<ref name="Iconic Designer"/><ref name="lemmons198402">Template:Cite news</ref> Her business cards read "Macintosh Artist".<ref name="Iconic Designer"/>
As a computer novice in the target market of the Macintosh, she easily grasped the Twiggy-based Macintosh prototype which "felt like a magical leap forward" for art design.<ref name="How Susan"/> She preferred it over the Apple II<ref name="hom_su"/> and was amazed and excited by the computer screen's design capability to undo, redo, and iterate an icon or letterform while seeing it simultaneously at enlarged and 100% target sizes.<ref name="How Susan"/> She immediately embraced Bill Atkinson's existing rudimentary graphics software tools and applications, to toggle pixels on and off and convert the resulting images to hexadecimal code for keyboard input.<ref name="hom_su"/> More advanced graphical tools were written for her by Hertzfeld,<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> and she embellished the flagship application MacPaint's user interface while the programmers matured it to become her primary tool.<ref name="hom_su"/> She contributed to the Macintosh identity and devised ways to make the machine humanized, intuitively usable, relatable, and inviting.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/>
Her whimsical personality was essential to the infectiously budding culture and lore of the early Macintosh team, and infused into the product. She stunned the staff of accomplished pixel artists and engineers with her unexpectedly personable renditions of their portraits in the Mac's standard Template:Nowrap pixel monochrome resolution for icons.<ref name="Steve Icon">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She and Steve Capps sewed a Jolly Roger pirate flag with a rainbow colored Apple logo eyepatch, as the christening brand of the new Macintosh headquarters at Bandley 3, embracing Steve Jobs' ethos "it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy".<ref name="Pirate Flag">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="hom_su"/><ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/> Working as the only graphic designer in a diverse and articulate team of programmers and with Hertzfeld as the primary requester, she spent hours or days at a time developing a rich selection of graphics for the consensus-driven feedback loop for each GUI element. Jobs personally approved each of her main desktop icons.<ref name="hom_su"/> Kare participated heavily in the prerelease marketing campaign for the Macintosh in 1983 by posing for magazine photo shoots, appearing in television advertisements, and demonstrating the Mac on television talk shows.<ref name="Iconic Designer"/>
In only one year, she designed the core visual design language of the original Macintosh which launched in January 1984. This includes original marketing material and many typefaces and icons, some of which became patented.<ref name="How Susan"/> As a whole platform of their own, these designs comprise the first visual language for the identity of the Macintosh and for Apple's pioneering of graphical user interface (GUI) computing.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Wired">Template:Cite magazine</ref>
She refined Apple's existing iconography and desktop metaphors imported from the Macintosh's predecessor, the Lisa,<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> such as the trash can, dog-eared paper icon, and I-beam cursor. She devised the practice of associating unique document icons with their creator applications.<ref name="hom_su"/> The team's GUI elements such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket became universal staples of computing. Her original cult classic icons include Clarus the Dogcow seen in the print dialog box, the Happy Mac icon of the smiling computer that welcomes users at system startup, and the Command key symbol on Apple keyboards.<ref name="hom_su" /><ref name="Tobin" /><ref name="Kare AIGA"/> Aligned with Steve Jobs's passion for calligraphy,<ref name="The Sketchbook"/> she designed the world's first proportionally spaced digital font family<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> including Chicago and Geneva, and the monospaced Monaco.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Chicago is her first font, made especially for systemwide use in menus and dialog; it has a bold vertical look initially named Elefont,<ref name="How Susan"/> in which Kare implemented Jobs's idea of variable spacing, where each character can have the unique pixel width that it needs, to differentiate the computer from a monospaced typewriter.<ref name="Celebrating"/> Cairo is a set of icons in font form, for combining graphics directly into text, akin to "proto-emojis".<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/>
She became a Creative Director in Apple Creative Services working for the department director, Tom Suiter, "at a time when it seemed as if the main Mac development was over".<ref name="A Question">Template:Cite interview</ref>
Smithsonian Magazine summarizes her groundbreaking Macintosh work: "It was an intense time with untold pressure to perform on a new product launch that demanded countless hours of work, rework and work again to get everything right." Kare recalled the privilege of being directly taught by engineers how early software is assembled:<ref name="I.D. Forty"/> "I loved working on that project—always felt so lucky for the opportunity to be a nontechnical person in a software group. I was awed by being able to collaborate with such creative, capable and dedicated engineers. My 'work/life balance' has improved since Template:Nowrap"<ref name="How Susan"/>
After Apple
In 1986,<ref name="Design Biography"/> Kare followed Steve Jobs in leaving Apple to launch NeXT, Inc. as its Creative Director and 10th employee.<ref name="How Susan"/><ref name="MICG-2022">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She introduced Jobs to her design hero Paul Rand and hired him to design NeXT's logo and brand identity, admiring his table-pounding exactitude and confidence.<ref name="hom_su"/> She created and re-created slideshows to Jobs's exacting last-minute requirements.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/>
She realized that she wanted "to be back doing bitmaps"<ref name="hom_su"/> so she left NeXT to become an independent designer with a client base including graphical computing giants Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Motorola, General Magic, and Intel.<ref name="How Susan"/><ref name="Design Biography"/><ref name="Tobin" /> Her projects for Microsoft include the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="nyt96">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> which taught early computer users to use a mouse to drag and drop objects on a screen. In 1987, she designed a "baroque" wallpaper,<ref name="I.D. Forty"/> numerous other icons, and design elements for Windows 3.0,<ref name="sjm" /> using isometric 3D and 16 dithered colors.<ref name="Design Biography"/> Many of her icons, such as those for Notepad and various Control Panels, remained essentially unchanged by Microsoft until Windows XP. For IBM, she produced pinstriped isometric bitmap icons and design elements for OS/2.<ref name="nyt96" /><ref name="I.D. Forty">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> For General Magic, she made Magic Cap's "impish" cartoon of dad's office desktop.<ref name="I.D. Forty"/> She was a founding partner of Susan Kare LLP in 1989.<ref name="Design Biography"/><ref name="Iconic Designer"/><ref name="Kare AIGA"/> At Eazel, she rejoined many from the former Macintosh team and contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager which the company permanently donated to the public for free use.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 2003, she became a member of the advisory board of Glam Media, now called Mode Media.<ref>"Susan Kare", Bloomberg Businessweek, December 16, 2014</ref> In 2003, she was recommended by Nancy Pelosi as one of four appointments to the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee for designing coins for the United States Mint.<ref name="Coinage">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Between 2006 and 2010,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> she produced hundreds of Template:Nowrap icons for the virtual gifts feature of Facebook.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="2019 NDA"/> Initially, profits from gift sales were donated to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation until Valentine's Day 2007.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> One of the gift icons, titled "Big Kiss" is featured in some versions of Mac OS X as a user account picture.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 2007, she designed the identity, icons, and website for Chumby Industries, Inc.,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> as well as the interface for its Internet-enabled alarm clock.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Since 2008,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) store in New York City has carried stationery and notebooks featuring her designs. In 2015, MoMA acquired her notebooks of sketches for the original Macintosh user interface.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Mac OS Icon sketchbook" />
In August 2012, she was called as an expert witness by Apple in the patent-infringement trial Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co..<ref name="BusinessWeek">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 2015, Kare was hired by Pinterest as a product design lead<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> as her first corporate employment in three decades.<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> Working with design manager Bob Baxley, the former design manager of the original Apple Online Store, she compared the diverse and design-driven corporate cultures of Pinterest and early 1980s Apple.<ref name="Pinterest Apple">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In February 2021, Kare became Design Architect at Niantic Labs.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Template:As of, she concurrently heads a digital design practice in San Francisco and sells limited-edition, signed fine-art prints.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=":0" />
Design philosophy
Kare's design principles are meaning, memorability, and clarity.<ref name="2019 NDA"/> She echoes the advice of Paul Rand, "Don't try to be original, just try to be good".<ref name="2019 NDA"/><ref name="Designboom"/> She focuses on simplicity in creating visual metaphors for computer commands.<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> Designing for the fullest range of users from novice to expert, she believes that the most meaningful icons are instantly easy to both understand and remember.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics"/><ref name="Kare AIGA"/> She said "an icon is successful if you could tell someone what it is once and they don't forget it."<ref name="nyt96"/> She said "good icons should function somewhat like traffic signsTemplate:Mdashsimple symbols with few extraneous details, which makes them more universal"<ref name="This is how"/> and notes that there is no impetus to continuously modernize a stop sign.<ref name="Pixel Perfect">Template:Cite magazine</ref> Using the same philosophy through the pixel art era and beyond, she has placed a "premium on context and metaphor", hunting the streets of San Francisco for inspiration from "catchy symbols and shapes".<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> When stuck on a design, she resourced inspiration from the books Kanji Pictograms for its table of the real-world origins of Japanese characters, and Symbol Sourcebook,<ref name="Symbol Sourcebook">Template:Cite book</ref> especially its reference for hobo graffiti.<ref name="hom_su" />
Her primary objective with the Macintosh was to humanize it, make it seem less like a machine, and give it "a smile".<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> She intended to bring "an artist's sensibility to a world that had been the exclusive domain of engineers and programmers" and "hoped to help counter the stereotypical image of computers as cold and intimidating".<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> Her Macintosh icons were inspired by many sources such as art history, wacky gadgets, pirate lore, Japanese logograms, and forgotten hieroglyphics.<ref name="hom_su" /><ref name="Kare AIGA"/> On the Mac keyboard, her concept for the command symbol was taken from the Saint Hannes cross, which is a symbol for a place of cultural interest used by Scandinavians of the 1960s such as at Swedish campgrounds.<ref name="Iconic Iconographer Priceonomics">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Kare Explains">Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref name="Kare AIGA"/>
She thrived in the problem-solving approach to severe technological constraints of the 1980s,<ref name="hom_su"/> drawing heavily upon her fine art experience in mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/><ref name="How Susan"/> Considering Template:Nowrap to be generous for icons, this improvised mastery of "a peculiar sort of minimal pointillism"<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> made her an early pioneer of pixel art. For example, her original fonts are constrained to Template:Nowrap per character, yet she solved the problem of the typical jagged look of existing monospaced computer typefaces by using only horizontal, vertical, or 45-degree lines.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/><ref name="How Susan"/> Veteran designers at Apple had previously thought it impossible to convey personality and accuracy in a human portrait of only Template:Nowrap until Kare did it.<ref name="Steve Icon"/>
Since the late 1980s, she uses Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator<ref name="This is how">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> using a grid-like template to simulate the constraints of the target device and user experience.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/> She has said that she would still prefer Template:Nowrap monochrome pixel art.<ref name="hom_su"/>
Reception
The Smithsonian Institution called her design language "simple, elegant, and whimsical".<ref name="Iconic Designer"/> In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited the first physical representation of her iconography, including her original Grid sketchbook,<ref name="Mac OS Icon sketchbook"/> saying "If the Mac turned out to be such a revolutionary object––a pet instead of a home appliance, a spark for the imagination instead of a mere work tool––it is thanks to Susan's fonts and icons, which gave it voice, personality, style, and even a sense of humor. Cherry bomb, anyone?"<ref name="Macintosh Smile">Template:Cite magazine</ref> They called her "a pioneering and influential computer iconographer [whose icon designs] communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style."<ref name="WoI"/> The American Institute of Graphic Arts characterized her style as a "whimsical charm and an independent streak" with an "artistic sleight of hand" and awarded her with its medal in April 2018.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In October 2019, Kare was awarded the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.<ref name="2019 NDA">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> On International Women's Day of 2018, Medium acknowledged Kare as a technologist who helped shape the modern world alongside programmer Ada Lovelace, computer scientist Grace Hopper, and astronaut Mae Jemison.<ref name="Celebrating">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 1997, I.D. magazine launched its I.D. Forty list of influential designers including Kare and Steve Jobs.<ref name="I.D. Forty"/> In October 2001, she received the Chrysler Design Award.<ref name="WoI">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Legacy
Susan Kare is considered a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical user interface,<ref name="Acid">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> having spent three decades of her career "at the apex of human-machine interaction".<ref name="Kare AIGA"/>
In co-creating the original Macintosh computer and documentation, she drove the visual language for Apple's pioneering graphical computing. Her most recognizable and enduring works at Apple include the world's first proportionally spaced digital font family of the Chicago, Geneva, and Monaco typefaces, and countless icons and interface components such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/><ref name="WoI"/> Chicago is the most prominent user-interface typeface seen in classic Mac OS interfaces from System 1 in 1984 to Mac OS 9 in 1999, and in the first four generations of the iPod interface. This cumulative work was key in making the Macintosh one of the most successful and foundational computing platforms of all time. Descendants of her groundbreaking 1980s work at Apple are universally seen throughout computing and in print.<ref name="Iconic Designer"/><ref name="Celebrating"/>
For decades, she seeded this visual language practice throughout the industry via industry giants such as Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2, Facebook, and Pinterest.<ref name="Kare AIGA"/>
Her icon portfolio has been featured as physical prints in the National Museum of American History, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. In 2025, MoMA's Paola Antonelli included over a dozen of Kare's icons (some displayed as original drawings on graph paper) alongside the work of Shigetaka Kurita and Milton Glazer in Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, an exhibition featuring "widely recognized design icons [...] highlighting pivotal moments in design history."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Pirouette: Turning Points in Design</ref>
Kare's work has a cult following, and large print versions of her digital portfolio are sold privately and at MoMA.<ref name="Kare AIGA" /><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Personal life
She was married to Jay Tannenbaum. Their marriage was dissolved in 2011.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She has three sons with him.<ref>Susan Kare, Biography wallma.wordpress.com</ref> Her brother was aerospace engineer Jordin Kare.<ref name="hom_su"/>
See also
References
Further reading
External links
- Template:Official website
- Template:MoMA artist
- Susan Kare. Sketches for Graphic User Interface Icons. 1982–83, audio recording of Kare from Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, Museum of Modern Art
- Template:YouTube
- Template:YouTube
- Icons by Susan Kare, exhibition catalogue from Icônes by Susan Kare exhibition at the MICG in Lyon, France
- Fonts created by KareTemplate:Webarchive
Template:Original Macintosh Design Team Template:Apple celeb Template:NeXT Computer
- Pages with broken file links
- 1954 births
- Living people
- AIGA medalists
- American digital artists
- American graphic designers
- American women digital artists
- American women graphic designers
- Apple Inc. employees
- Artists from Ithaca, New York
- Artists from San Francisco
- Facebook employees
- Harriton High School alumni
- Interface designers
- Mount Holyoke College alumni
- NeXT people
- OS/2 people
- Pinterest people
- Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development alumni
- Typefaces designed by Susan Kare