Susan Kare

Susan Kare ( "care"; born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer from 1983 to 1986.

She graduated from Harriton High School in 1971.

She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, with an undergraduate honors thesis on mathematics.

She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University in 1978 with a doctoral dissertation on "the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honoré Daumier and Claes Oldenburg".

Her goal was "to be either a fine artist or teacher".

Susan Kare's career has always focused on fine art.

For several summers during high school she interned at the Franklin Institute for designer Harry Loucks, who introduced her to typography and graphic design while she did phototypesetting with "strips of type for labels in a dark room on a PhotoTypositor".

Because she did not attend an artist training school, she built her experience and portfolio by taking many pro-bono graphics jobs such as posters and brochure design in college, holiday cards, and invitations.

After her Ph.D., she moved to San Francisco to work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), as sculptor and occasional curator.

She later reflected that her "ideal life would be to make art full-time but that sculpture was too solitary".

In 1982, Kare was welding a life-sized razorback hog sculpture commissioned by an Arkansas museum when she received a phone call from high school friend Andy Hertzfeld.

In exchange for an Apple II computer, he solicited her to hand-draw a few icons and font elements to inspire the upcoming Macintosh computer.

However, she had no experience in computer graphics and "didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface" or pixel art so she drew heavily upon her fine art experience in mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism.

He suggested that she get a US$2.50 grid notebook of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto and mock up several 32 × 32 pixel representations of his software commands and applications.

This includes an icon of scissors for the "cut" command, a finger for "paste", and a paintbrush for MacPaint.

Compelled to actually join the team for a fixed-length part-time job, she interviewed "totally green" but undaunted, bringing a variety of typography books from the Palo Alto public library to show her interest alongside her well-prepared notebook.

She "aced" the interview and was hired in January 1983 with Badge #3978.

Her business cards read "HI Macintosh Artist".

As a computer novice in the target market of the Macintosh, she easily grasped the Twiggy-based Macintosh prototype which "felt like a magical leap forward" for art design.

She preferred it over the Apple II and was amazed and excited by the computer screen's design capability to undo, redo, and iterate an icon or letterform while seeing it simultaneously at enlarged and 100% target sizes.

She immediately embraced Bill Atkinson's existing rudimentary graphics software tools and applications, to toggle pixels on and off and convert the resulting images to hexadecimal code for keyboard input.

More advanced graphical tools were written for her by Hertzfeld, and she embellished the flagship application MacPaint's user interface while the programmers matured it to become her primary tool.

She contributed to the Macintosh identity and devised ways to make the machine humanized, intuitively usable, relatable, and inviting.

Her whimsical personality was essential to the infectiously budding culture and lore of the early Macintosh team, and infused into the product.

She stunned the staff of accomplished pixel artists and engineers with her unexpectedly personable renditions of their portraits in the Mac's standard 32 × 32 pixel monochrome resolution for icons.

She and Steve Capps sewed a Jolly Roger pirate flag with a rainbow colored Apple logo eyepatch, as the christening brand of the new Macintosh headquarters at Brandley 3, embracing Steve Jobs's ethos "it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy".

Working as the only graphic designer in a diverse and articulate team of programmers and with Hertzfeld as the primary requester, she spent hours or days at a time developing a rich selection of graphics for the consensus-driven feedback loop for each GUI element.

Jobs personally approved each of her main desktop icons.

Kare participated heavily in the prerelease marketing campaign for the Macintosh in 1983 by posing for magazine photo shoots, appearing in television advertisements, and demonstrating the Mac on television talk shows.

In only one year, she designed the core visual design language of the original Macintosh which launched in January 1984.

This includes original marketing material and many typefaces and icons, some of which became patented.

As a whole platform of their own, these designs comprise the first visual language for the identity of the Macintosh and for Apple's pioneering of graphical user interface (GUI) computing.

She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985.

She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Kare was an employee of Niantic Labs.

As a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant designers of modern technology.

Kare was born in Ithaca, New York.

Her father was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research facility for the senses of taste and smell.

Her mother taught her counted-thread embroidery as she immersed herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts.

Her brother was aerospace engineer Jordin Kare.