Susan Kare

Who She Is

In 1982, Susan Kare was a sculptor when her high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, a member of Apple's Macintosh team, called to ask her to design small pictures for the new computer. She had no computer experience, so she went to an art supply store in Palo Alto, bought a $2.50 grid-paper sketchbook, and filled its tiny squares with pencil and colored pens to stand in for the pixels on a screen. Her mother had taught her counted-thread embroidery, which had already given her practice building pictures out of tiny squares. She became the only person creating screen graphics for the Macintosh group, and her business card read "Macintosh Artist." Her designs included a trash can, a document with a turned-up corner, and a smiling Mac face that greeted people when the computer started up.

Why She Matters

Kare had never designed a typeface before, but she created Chicago, the bold system font that stayed on Macintosh computers from 1984 until 1997. When Steve Jobs decided there were too many Apple logos on the screen, she searched an international symbol dictionary and found a looped, cloverleaf-like symbol used in Sweden to mark places of interest, and it still appears on the Mac's Command key today. She also looked to a book of Kanji, characters used in Japanese writing, for ideas, because some of them work a lot like tiny icons. Her ticking wristwatch told people to wait while the computer worked, and she drew a disk icon for saving files. A floppy-disk symbol still means "save" on many screens today, long after real floppy disks disappeared. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art now jointly own her original 1982 sketchbook.