One of Apple’s pillars is to understand technology as a design object. Without the contribution of those of Cupertino, neither the current design of computers nor the very graphic interfaces can be understood. We owe a lot to the original team that designed the graphics for the original Macintosh and other computers of the time.
But if you have to remember anyone in particular from this team when it comes to graphic design, that person is Susan Kare. So much so that we still have traces of his original ideas on our devices today. If you don’t believe me, just know that the CMD keys symbol comes from his head.
From paper to embroidery and pixel
The story of how Kare created the original icons for the Mac OS operating system is an example of how great ideas can come from the most unexpected places. It was her mother who taught her to do thread embroidery, encouraged after seeing that her daughter loved the art and was not shy about experimenting with all kinds of crafts and materials.
His aspirations since then were already clear: become an artist or teacher. He began his professional career working at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, and shortly before the first Macs were shown, he hopped to another museum in Arkansas where he came to create reproductions at the scale of animals such as wild boar.
The first icons of the Mac were not created digitally: Susan Kare used graph paper
And it was precisely while she was working on one of these boars in Hot Springs that Susan received a call. It was from Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend and engineer who was deeply involved in creating Apple’s next big product. Andy told him he had to come to his office to show him what he was working on.
Priceonomics reflects what Susan remembers of that call:
He showed me a very rudimentary Macintosh and told me that I had to equip it with graphics. Andy knew I was interested in graphic art, and he told me that if I could create “little pictures” on grid paper, he could translate each little square onto the computer screen. It suited me as a big project. I did this on the condition of receiving an Apple II, although I didn’t use it to create these graphics.
What Susan used to create the first “little pictures”, or the first icons, it was physical graph paper. In the same way as she did with the thread embroidery, Susan painted each square of the paper one color to form symbols:
This is how the first icons were created. On paper, taking each grid as pixels.
The symbol or icon of the action of cutting, scissors. Some applications still use this symbol. Image from Priceonomics
Simple truth? Well, in 80s computing, creating these symbols and allowing them to be translated into pixels of a GUI was revolutionary. And so Susan Kare was accepted into the new position of “Macintosh Artist”, added to the team that was then under the direction of Jef Raskin. Kare had to learn digital graphic arts from scratch, but she had no problem jumping into the medium as if nothing had happened. His interest was more than enough and Hertzfeld himself created a small application capable of creating and editing these icons to simplify his work.
A collection of icons that everyone remembers
It was during this time that Susan created a whole collection of icons that Macintosh users will remember like yesterday. He loved, he said in interviews he would later give, how the process of working on 16×16 or 32×32 pixel canvases was like a puzzle in which one had to create an image that was “the marriage between creation and metaphor “. Embroidery, worn on screens:
It’s been a while since these icons have been used, hasn’t it? They are all the creation of Susan Kare.
Also at the time Kare creates the icon for the CMD key, or COMMAND. This “fly” is always present in the keyboards of all Macs, and even in those of iPads. How not to recognize it:
These pixel webs were also used by Susan Kare to create the first Mac fonts, including the legendary “Monaco”. The idea was to use these pixels so that, when they are small enough on the computer, the letters look like they were printed on paper. Obviously, this now seems absurd to us with the resolutions we have today, but back then, again, this was a nice step forward:
In all this work, Kare he didn’t get rid of the character of Steve Jobs. “The trick was to show him multiple versions of a job so he could pick the one he liked the most,” he said, “because if you showed him just one version to tell him s loved her, the answer was always going to be No.”
Susan’s work was so important that she even starred in a simple commercial for the original Macintosh describing her way of working:
“If you’re an artist and you’re experienced, it’s a new medium that has great control. You have a thousand little dots in half an inch. And you have the ability to zoom them, turn them on, and turn them off. Each of those points. So no, there’s nothing you can’t present on a screen [del Mac].
Yes, there are Susan Kare icons beyond Apple
Susan’s time at Apple ended along with that of Steve Jobs when he was fired from the company. They both started working on NeXT, although he missed working with his pixmaps too much. And since that wasn’t a priority at this company, Kare moved on to do more diverse jobs. The original Windows solitaire cards? It was his thing:
You don’t get rid of Susan Kare’s legacy even in Windows.
Other companies Kare has worked for have been Intel, IBM, Motorola or even Sony. And at Microsoft, it came to make legendary icons like the one on the first Notepad, which we’ve all used at some point in our lives.
Today, 69-year-old Susan has her own design studio from which she works for various companies. Of course, he has already moved from working on simple bitmaps to using more advanced tools in the spirit of the times, but always with the same objective: create symbols that are very good at conveying what they represent.
Susan Kare may no longer be with Apple, but her work is well known in the computing and design world. It has been exhibited in none other than the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has received awards from institutions such as the American Institute of Grapis Arts. and its simple pixelated icons are still easily recognizable to all of us who use a Macintosh at some point in our lives.
Pictures | Court, Insung Yoon
In Applesphere | Only if you worked at Apple or Disney do you have access to this exclusive book on Steve Jobs: we tell you what makes it unique
