Susan Kare aka “the woman who gave the Macintosh a smile” is an American graphic designer known for her interface elements for the Apple Macintosh. She graduated with a Bachelor of Honors, summa cum laude(with the highest praise), in arts.
The woman who gave the Macintosh a smile
In the 1980s, a high school friend working at Apple contacted Susan and said they needed graphic help. From there on she designed icons and typefaces for the computer, icons we see and use until this day, such as the save disc, lasso tool, and the paint bucket, that we see, much more modern though in many software used today, such as photoshop and other software that includes creative design.
When Susan created the icons and the typefaces, she was given a paper with pixels to create with, ironic enough, to represent the icons’ real-life counterparts, she took inspiration from cross stitching she and her mother did when she was younger since pixel art was much like cross-stitching. During the making of the icons, there was a lot of creativity involved as well as logical thinking. For example, when she created an icon for an application where you would write documents, the icon she made would be the verb, someone writing on a paper. While the file itself would be a written document, that it had been written on, for the user to understand that it has been written already, it’s a finished document.
After working for Apple, Susan began working as an independent designer and had clients such as Pinterest, IBM, Sony Pictures, Intel, Facebook, Motorola, and Microsoft. When working with Microsoft she ended up designing the iconic card deck for Solitaire that we all know and love, which was one of the first projects she did on a computer with colour.
Susan, later on, worked with Facebook from the mid-2000s to 2010, on a virtual gift project where she created hundreds of icons that you could gift to other users for a dollar, they would release a new image every day at midnight. Susan saw this as a fun little challenge to see what you could make on a 64 by 64-pixel image that would make people spend a dollar.
Susan would later on in 2015 started working at Pinterest as a product design lead where she designed products and icons, and In February 2021, Susan began working as a Design Architect for Niantic Labs(source), which is American software development, known for its AR games such as Pokémon Go.
Final words
Susan was ahead of her time as a designer, a creative genius that shaped icons as we see them today. According to Susan herself, good icons should be like road signs rather than mere illustrations. The user should understand them with clarity and not be confused by unnecessary details. These are practices that are being taught out today, and for her to understand the importance back then before interaction design was a thing, is truly inspiring, and shows how much of a genius she really was.
Sources:
https://www.domestika.org/en/blog/3320-susan-kare-an-iconic-career