![]() ![]() Also, the “Clarus the Dogcow” icon created as part of the Cairo font. One of these is the “Happy Mac” icon, a smiling Mac computer that appeared to greet its user every time it opened. You can see examples of this in some of her most well-known icons. These make her designs remain memorable until this day. She always created with her own touch of whimsicality and freethinking spirit. ![]() Kare’s icons encompass a great sense of intelligence, everlasting wit, and humanity with the perfect balance between simplicity and abstraction. Icon design is like solving a puzzle, trying to marry an image and idea that, ideally, will be easy for people to understand and remember. Simple images can communicate with wide audiences over time. Then, she proceeded to hand-drew the design of early Apple icons, one by one, pixel by pixel. Each one represented a pixel as a way to mimic the bit-mapped display of the early Apple interface. She drew out a 32-by-32 grid that has a total of 1,024 squares. Since Kare had no prior experience working in the digital realm, she instead utilized her skills with mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism during the sketching process. Image courtesy of Susan Kare The creation of Apple Macintosh iconsīeing the first affordable nontechnical computer for regular consumers, the Macintosh icons needed to be universally inviting and intuitive to use. Image courtesy of Susan Kare Paintbrush sketch. Image courtesy of Susan Kare Scissor sketch. Here she was assigned with a daunting task: creating iconographies to make the Macintosh feel like a more approachable, friendly workstation, and less like a machine. Kare joined the Macintosh team at Apple through a recommendation of a high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld, in 1982. She soon moved to Palo Alto-the birthplace of Apple and other Silicon Valley tech titans. After graduation, she traveled west to take a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She is the third designer in our four-part blog series-after Cipe Pineles and April Greiman-about influential woman designers in history. Kare is widely recognized for her iconic design of the early Macintosh computers that defined the Apple user experience and set the industry standard. If you are using Macintosh, you are definitely indebted to Susan Kare, the woman “who gave the Macintosh a smile”. ![]()
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