From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Susan Kare (born 1954) is 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. ^[1]

Contents 1 Background 2 Apple Computer Inc. 3 After Apple 4 References 5 External links 5.1 Biographies and history of the Macintosh 5.2 Fonts

Kare was born in Ithaca, New York and is the sister of rocket scientist and filker Jordin Kare. She 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 an art museum.

Kare joined Apple Inc. after receiving a call from her high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld, in the early 1980s. She worked for Apple from 1983 to 1986. She is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the original Macintosh OS. 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 three generations of the Apple iPod interface), the Geneva typeface, Clarus the Dogcow, the Happy Mac (the smiling computer that welcomed Mac users when starting their machines for 18 years, until Mac OS X 10.2 replaced it with a grey Apple logo), and the symbol on the Command key on Apple keyboards (also known as the Apple key).

After leaving Apple, Kare joined NeXT as the Creative Director. She 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. In addition, she has produced icons for the Valentine's Day "Gifts" feature of the popular social-networking website, Facebook.

• Biography from original website
• Interview for History of the Macintosh website — Stanford University
• Designer Susan Kare Gives Pixels Personality — Mount Holyoke College
• Interview — The Guardian

• Kare's fonts
• Kare's fonts — Facebook

Original Macintosh Developer Team
Jef Raskin · Bill Atkinson · Burrell Smith · Chris Espinosa · Joanna Hoffman · George Crow · Jerry Manock · Susan Kare · Andy Hertzfeld