Susan Kare

The Macintosh icons and typefaces

She joined Apple in January 1983^※1 and took charge of designing the icons and typefaces for the Macintosh. The title on her business card is said to have been "Macintosh Artist". She is reported to have brought to her interview a notebook of pixel drawings she had made on graph paper.

The constraints of the time were severe: a grid of 16 by 16 or 32 by 32 pixels, only two values, black and white, and no anti-aliasing. Under these conditions she had to make images that conveyed at a glance what they depicted and were also friendly. Her method of filling in squares on graph paper was close to the way embroidery patterns and mosaics are made, and it was a case where her grounding in art history applied directly.

Among typefaces, Chicago was her first job, and it remained in use in the Mac OS user interface from 1984 to 1997. The capitals were 9 pixels high and 7 pixels wide, with no rounded corners, according to accounts.

The command key symbol

Among her works, one with an especially long life is the command key symbol "⌘". This symbol, a square with a loop at each corner, was taken from a book of historical Swedish symbols she consulted, and corresponds to the figure called the looped square or Saint Hannes cross^※2. In the Nordic countries it has been used on signs marking places of interest and cultural heritage.

It has continued to be engraved on the keyboards of Apple products and is still in use more than 40 years later. It is an example of how the choice to bring in an existing cultural symbol as it was resulted in a very long lifespan.

After Apple

After leaving Apple she followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, where she was one of the early members (employee number 10) and served as creative director. After founding her own studio in 1989, she designed interface elements for many companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Facebook and Sony Pictures. It was also in this period that she was involved in defining the look of Windows 3.0.

In 2015 she joined Pinterest, and she has since worked at Niantic as well^※3. In 2018 she received the AIGA Medal, and she received a lifetime achievement award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum^※4. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.