Susan Kare (American, b. 1954) designed the icons, typefaces and screen graphics that gave the original Apple Macintosh its visual language in the early 1980s.,Trained as a fine artist, she approached each icon as a small visual puzzle, drawing on mosaics, embroidery and pointillism to translate ideas into a grid of black-and-white pixels.,
Kare studied art at Mount Holyoke College and earned a PhD in fine arts from New York University.She then worked as a sculptor and curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.In 1982, while working on a commissioned sculpture, she was recruited to Apple by her high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, joining as the sole creator of the Macintosh's screen graphics.,,Without formal training in software, she first sketched her icons on graph paper, mapping each square to a pixel, before Apple's bitmap editor existed.
Among her designs were the Happy Mac startup icon, the floppy disk save symbol, the Command key symbol and the Chicago typeface that shipped with the original Mac.,,She described good icons as working “more akin to road signs rather than illustrations”, aiming for what she called “the economy of expression”.After Steve Jobs left Apple to found NeXT, Kare joined as its tenth employee and creative director.,She later worked as a design consultant to Microsoft, IBM and Facebook.,She has served as Creative Director at Pinterest since 2015 and, from 2023, as design architect at Niantic Labs.,,
In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art jointly acquired her archive of original hand-drawn Macintosh icon sketches, shown that year in MoMA's exhibition “This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good”.Her work is also held in the collections of the London Design Museum and the National Museum of American History.In 2022, the Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication in Lyon presented a survey of her iconography, “Icônes by Susan Kare”.,
In 2024, Kare partnered with Asprey Studio, founded in 2021 to blur the boundaries between art and design, on Esc Keys, a collection of 32 new icons rendered as enamelled sterling silver and gold vermeil computer keys and pendants, each paired with a matching digital artwork.,It was previewed in London during Frieze week before its release, with the icons also issued as NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals. It followed her earlier White Rose, a 1,000-edition pixel artwork whose proceeds were donated to the organization Stop AAPI Hate.
