Susan Kare

Susan Kare

Susan Kare is an artist and graphic designer who created many of the visual interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. She was also one of the original employees of NeXT (the company formed by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985), working as the Creative Director.

Kare was born in Ithaca, New York and is the sister of rocket scientist and filker Jordin Kare. She graduated from Harriton High School in 1971, received her bachelors degree in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, and her Ph.D. from New York University in 1978. She next moved to San Francisco and worked for an art museum.

Kare joined Apple Computer, Inc. after receiving a call from her high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld, in the early 1980s. She and mainly worked in the Macintosh Software Group where her title was "Macintosh Artist". However, she did work as a Creative Director in Creative Services for a short time before leaving for NeXT.

She is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the original Macintosh OS. Indeed, descendants of her groundbreaking work can still be seen in many computer graphics tools and accessories, especially icons such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket. An early pioneer of pixel art, her most recognizable works from her time with Apple are the Chicago typeface (the most prominent user interface typeface seen in Classic Mac OS, as well as the typeface used in the first three generations of the Apple iPod interface), the Geneva typeface, Clarus the Dogcow, the Happy Mac (the smiling computer that welcomed Mac users when starting their machines for 18 years, until Mac OS X 10.2 replaced it with a grey Apple logo), and the symbol on the Command key on Apple keyboards.

Susan was probably the first designer to create a GUI, since no other computer had ever had one. Xerox had created, in a very rudimentary sense, an icon-driven GUI, but it is believed that Susan Kare was the person who really made it intuitive.

After leaving Apple, Kare joined NeXT as the Creative Director. She later became a successful independent graphic designer working with clients such as Microsoft and IBM. Her projects for Microsoft included the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game, as well as numerous icons and design elements for Windows 3.0. 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 icons and design elements for OS/2; for Eazel she contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager.

The Museum of Modern Art store in New York City has begun carrying stationery and notebooks featuring Susan Kare's designs. From 2007 she produced icons for the "Gifts" feature of the popular social-networking website, Facebook. Initially, profits from gift sales were donated to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, for the fight against breast cancer. After Valentine's Day, the gift selection was modified to include new and limited edition gifts that did not necessarily pertain to Valentine's Day.