Too little and the audience can no longer see themselves in it. Graphic designer Susan Kare is the “woman who gave the Macintosh a smile.” 1 She is best known for designing the distinctive icons, typefaces, and other graphic elements that gave the Apple Macintosh its characteristic—and widely emulated—look and feel. Courtesy of Susan Kare and kareprints.com. After her P… Because she didn't 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. "5 As instructed, Kare went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto, picked up a $2.50 sketchbook, and began experimenting with forms and ideas. She also created dozens of new icons for Hertzfeld and the software group. Steve Jobs may not have been Italian, but he clearly had a strong affinity for Italy. Her most iconic designs (many of which now hang in the Museum of Modern Art) found the perfect balance between these two extremes. Kare’s icon designs were intuitive, but they also had a playful, whimsical quality; think of the smiling “Happy Mac” that greeted users at startup or the ticking bomb that represented a system error. She was working on a commission—“welding a life-size razorback hog” for an Arkansas museum—when she received a phone call from Andy Hertzfeld, an old high school classmate from the Philadelphia suburbs. The original emoji, Cairo was a typeface designed by Susan Kare in 1984 for the first Macintosh operating system. They gave a lifeless computer a warmth and personality that lives on in the modern Mac to this day. Right: The spirit of Kare's "Happy Mac" lives on in Apple's Face ID. © Norman Seeff. Photo by Brad Feinknopf. Like proto-emojis, the Cairo font set was composed of several miniature images—including a palm tree, a crescent moon, and a skateboard—and allowed users to easily embed miniature images within their text.11, A selection of Kare’s Macintosh fonts, named for “world class cities,” 1983-1984. This Japanese woodcut by Goyo Hashiguchi was owned by Steve Jobs. "I went into it totally green." That was actually an asset of having to work within 32x32 pixels and monochrome.”, “The printer on the left obviously looks outdated. Hertzfeld needed some images and typefaces for the new Macintosh and asked if Kare would be interested in interviewing for a graphic design job.2 There was only one problem: Kare had never worked in computer graphics and she admittedly “didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface.” Undaunted, Kare went to the Palo Alto public library and checked out a number of books on typography. Susan Kare designed the distinctive icons, typefaces, and other graphic elements that gave the Apple Macintosh its characteristic—and widely emulated—look and feel. When I got to Apple at first I was still working on paper. That system typeface, later renamed Chicago, provided the textual look for two of Apple's biggest products—the Macintosh and the iPod—for over 20 years.10, Kare would produce several other font sets for the Macintosh. Today marks the 30th anniversary of Apple’s famous “1984” television ad that aired on January 22, 1984 during the third quarter of the Super Bowl XVIII between the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins. After years of running her own business, the new corporate gig is Kare’s first full-time, salaried job in thirty years.13. Kare has earned a multitude of professional accolades for her life’s work, but she does not let these honorifics go to her head: “I still spend my days turning dots on and off,” she says with characteristic humility.14 But Kare’s influence is significant. After the program, guests will have the opportunity to examine some relevant objects from the museum’s collections and enjoy a light reception. Behind the scenes of top creative projects. “I didn't have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design.”4, An original sketch for a “Danger” icon from Susan Kare’s sketchbook, about 1983. Typeface design imposed even more rigorous constraints than the icons. “I was just not sure what a ‘feature’ looked like … so I was thumbing through a symbol dictionary and I came across this symbol (⌘). The Macintosh featured a bit-mapped display in which each point of light, or pixel, on the screen was individually controlled by a single bit of data. She produced several exquisite MacPaint drawings for the Macintosh’s glossy user manuals and promotional advertisements, including a Japanese woman combing her hair, a pair of tennis shoes, and gourmet baby food. It went against my general notion of that things should have some meaning because then there’s a little visual mnemonic to help you remember what it is. This month Susan Kare was awarded an AIGA medal, putting her in the company of design greats like Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames, Milton Glaser and Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of Susan Kare and kareprints.com, Kare tweaked and streamlined certain icons that Apple had already used for its Lisa personal computer, such as the arrow cursor, the trash can, and the “document” icon with the turned-up page corner. Susan Kare’s icons and fonts for the original Macintosh were revolutionary. In the back of the book, it said it was for an ‘interesting feature’ at Swedish campgrounds. Places of Invention tells the stories of historic and modern communities where people, resources, and spaces have come together to spark inventiveness. We had permission to be friendly. Kare also experimented with more avant garde fonts, such as Ransom (later San Francisco), whose characters looked like the newspaper cutouts from a kidnapper’s note, and Cairo, which appropriately looked like a set of modern hieroglyphics. 416, 1 March 1984, online at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-birth-of-the-mac-rolling-stones-1984-feature-on-steve-jobs-and-his-whiz-kids-20111006?print=true, accessed 1 December 2017. Steve Jobs decided that there were too many logos in the interface, so Kare was asked to come up with an icon to represent a “feature” instead. In 1982, Kare was living in the Bay Area and working as a sculptor. Graphic designer Susan Kare is the “woman who gave the Macintosh a smile.”1  She is best known for designing the distinctive icons, typefaces, and other graphic elements that gave the Apple Macintosh its characteristic—and widely emulated—look and feel. Courtesy of Susan Kare and kareprints.com, Hertzfeld told Kare “to go to the stationery store and get the smallest graph paper I could find and color in the squares to make images. 12 Pang, “Interview with Susan Kare;” “Susan Kare Macintosh Commercial,” produced by advertising firm Chiat/Day, Fall 1983, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY1-UYnaBm8, accessed 1 December 2017. Copyright 2020, Smithsonian Institution, All Rights Reserved, exhibitions_places-of-invention-ROTO-exhibit-pics-silicon-valley.jpg, inventors-kare-susan-dangersksketchbook-ckare-750-inline-edit.gif, inventors-kare-susan-sv-1983-00-00-selectionofapplemacintoshicons-fromkaredotcom-portfolio2-450-inline-edit.gif, inventors-kare-susan-original-mac-fonts-wikimediacommons-cdavidremahl-450-inline-edit.gif, inventors-kare-susan-sv-1983-00-00-macpaintscreenshotwithjapaneselady-fromkaredotcom-portfolio1-750-inline-edit.gif, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-woman-who-gave-the-macintosh-a-smile, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/mac/primary/interviews/kare/trans.html, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3038976/what-every-young-designer-should-know-from-legendary-apple-designer-susan-kare, http://priceonomics.com/the-woman-behind-apples-first-icons/, http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook-of-susan-kare-the-artist-who-gave-computing-a-human-face/, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043312/moma-recognizes-susan-kare-the-designer-of-the-macintoshs-original-icons, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-birth-of-the-mac-rolling-stones-1984-feature-on-steve-jobs-and-his-whiz-kids-20111006?print=true, http://technical.ly/philly/2011/01/14/susan-kare-regional-rail-and-the-original-macintosh-fonts/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY1-UYnaBm8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7nIVrNGApw, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3049313/design-moves/pinterest-hires-mac-design-legend-susan-kare, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3050038/design-moves/qa-susan-kare-on-why-pinterest-feels-like-apple-in-the-80s, https://web.archive.org/web/20141017185556/http://www.kare.com/design_bio.html, Invention Hot Spot: Silicon Valley and the Beginnings of the Computer Revolution in the 1970s. In July 2015, Pinterest announced that Kare would be joining the social bookmarking site as the product design lead. 13 John Brownlee, “Pinterest Hires Mac Design Legend Susan Kare,” Fast Company, 31 July 2015, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3049313/design-moves/pinterest-hires-mac-design-legend-susan-kare, accessed 1 December 2017; John Brownlee, “Q&A: Susan Kare On Why Pinterest Feels Like Apple In The ‘80s,” Fast Company, 19 August 2015, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3050038/design-moves/qa-susan-kare-on-why-pinterest-feels-like-apple-in-the-80s, accessed 1 December 2017. Susan Kare, Apple’s “Macintosh Artist,” relaxes at her desk in 1984. Since then, Kare has spent the last three decades designing user interface elements for many leading software and Internet firms. 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 phototypesettingwith "strips of type for labels in a dark room on a PhotoTypositor". “Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple,” recalled Kare. Historian Eric Hintz describes how the “1984” ad and the introduction of the Apple Macintosh were key milestones both in the history of computing and the history of advertising. 8 Steven Levy, “The Birth of the Mac,” Rolling Stone no. Milanote is the tool for organizing creative projects. If I got some graph paper I could make small images out of the squares and transfer those onto the computer screen.”, “Andy Herzfeld wrote an icon editor and that let you see magnified what you were working on and also as you turned the bits on and off you could see it real size. Left: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. 9 Steve Silberman, “Signposts in New Space,” introduction to Susan D. Kare, Icons: Selected Works from 1983-2011 (San Francisco: Susan Kare / Kareprints.com, 2011): 1-5, quotation p. 3; Zuckerman, “The Designer Who Made the Mac Smile.”, 10 Brownlee, “What Every Young Designer Should Know.”, 11 Susan Kare, “World Class Cities,” in Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2005), 165; Brian James Kirk, “Susan Kare, Regional Rail and the original Macintosh fonts,” Technical.ly Philly, 14 January 2011, http://technical.ly/philly/2011/01/14/susan-kare-regional-rail-and-the-original-macintosh-fonts/, accessed 11 September 2015; Crockett, “The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons.”. I still think about his philosophy of not showing too much information at once and the value of simplicity in visual messaging.”. Kare appears on Season 1, Episode 18 (29 March 1984) of The Computer Chronicles, a public television program that aired on KCSM in San Mateo, CA; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7nIVrNGApw, accessed 1 December 2017. Over the next three decades, Kare would design user interface elements for many of the leading software and Internet firms, from Microsoft to Oracle to Facebook. The AIGA award celebrates a career spent searching for the right amount of simplicity and abstraction. She brought “an artist’s sensibility to a world that had been the exclusive domain of engineers and programmers,” and in the process, she says, “I hoped to help counter the stereotypical image of computers as cold and intimidating.”15 With thirty years (and counting) of simple, elegant, and whimsical designs, Kare has made personal computing more appealing for millions of new users. Though Kare had little experience in computing she drew inspiration from her deep knowledge of history! 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