Dr. Susan Kare

An artist and graphic designer who created many of the 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. She was born in Ithaca, New York and received her B.A., summa cum laude, 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 the Museum of Modern Art. She joined Apple Computer, Inc. in 1982 after receiving a call from her high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld. She was originally hired into the Macintosh software group to design user interface graphics and fonts; her business cards read "Macintosh Artist". Later, she was a Creative Director in Apple Creative Services working for the Director of that organization, Tom Suiter. She is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the original Macintosh operating system. 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 four generations of the Apple iPod interface), the Geneva typeface, the original monospace Monaco typeface, Clarus the Dogcow, the Happy Mac (the smiling computer that welcomed Mac users when starting their machines), and the symbol on the Command key on Apple keyboards. After leaving Apple, she joined NeXT as the Creative Director and 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 her designs. Beginning February 7, 2007 she has produced icons for the "Gifts" feature of the popular social-networking website, Facebook. She currently heads a digital design practice in San Francisco and sells signed prints at kareprints.com.