
Susan Kare designed the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionary - matt4077
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-woman-who-gave-the-macintosh-a-smile
======
kurthr
Sadly, the icon garden was closed by 1997 as part of Job's reinvention of the
company. It was a great place to meet and a public garden that Apple put in to
get their Infinite Loop campus built in Cupertino.

[https://www.quora.com/Where-did-Apples-icon-garden-
sculpture...](https://www.quora.com/Where-did-Apples-icon-garden-sculptures-
go-after-the-garden-was-decommissioned)

Lots of employees were shocked and a bug report went around after they went
missing... something like "missing icons on reboot. Still missing after finder
recovery."

Before there was the android version garden... there were the mac icons...

[http://clarus.chez-alice.fr/c_applegarden.php](http://clarus.chez-
alice.fr/c_applegarden.php)

------
hypertexthero
What a wonderful article!

I have always loved Susan’s work, particularly the dogcow —
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow) —
and her bitmap fonts —
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=World_Class_Cities.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&author=Susan+Kare)

~~~
aeorgnoieang
The Wikipedia article about dogcow states that someone else made it:

> In 1983, the dog icon had been created by Susan Kare as the glyph for "z",
> as part of the Cairo font. Later, when designing the classic Mac OS "Page
> Setup" print dialog box, an example image was required to demonstrate the
> orientation and color of the paper.[2] HCI engineer Annette Wagner made the
> decision to use that dog as a starting point, editing it and creating a
> larger version with spots to be more suitable for demonstrating various
> printing options. The new dog graphic had a more bovine look.

It claims that Susan Kare made the _dog_ icon but Annette Wagner made _dogcow_
based on it.

~~~
kevinslashslash
I got the impression that the dogcow was essentially a mistake, like
stretching 4:3 to 16:9. The changes were intentionally (and manually) done to
better fit with Page Setup, but it not intended to look like a cow or dogcow
hybrid. I don't have any sources though, just something I think I read many
years ago.

------
elvinyung
Totally shilling right now, but I got a physical set of the playing cards [1]
that she designed for Windows 3.0 Solitaire, and I swear that it's one of my
favorite novelty purchases.

[1] [https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire-
cards?variant=14...](https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire-
cards?variant=14622412804)

~~~
devindotcom
I've got the other set - the beach!

[http://shop.cooperhewitt.org/p/3953/evan-roth-solitaire-
deck...](http://shop.cooperhewitt.org/p/3953/evan-roth-solitaire-deck-of-
cards)

(high five)

------
tim333
I think the smile made quite a difference to people's perception of macs. I
quite like stuff like that and the Reddit alien. Macs image seems to have
shifted a bit from friendly boxes to cool thin things for the well off.

~~~
nsxwolf
Their stuff is far more affordable today than it was back in the day. That's
why it's in the hands of hundreds of millions of users.

That friendly box that was the original Macintosh retailed for $2,495 in 1984
dollars. You can get a MacBook Air for $999 in 2018 dollars.

~~~
tokyodude
that's really irrelevant when PC notebooks can had for $200-$300. That means
that not well off are not going to be chosing macs

~~~
nsxwolf
The existence of even cheaper computers does not make my point irrelevant. A
larger proportion of the population can afford a Mac today than in 1984, and
an even larger proportion still can afford a computer of any sort.

------
Animats
Her web site is "kare.com". She's done icons for Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk,
Facebook, Paypal... She's still doing graphic design.

Good icons are really hard. Most icons suck. Open source software icons
especially suck. Open source people just do not seem to get communication
through graphic design at all.

------
eadmund
She is very talented, and has a good eye for proportion & shape. When you
compare the classic black-and-white Macintosh to Amiga, GEM, OpenWindows,
Windows 3.1, Windows 95 &c. you see that the Mac was head-and-shoulders above
the rest.

~~~
wenc
Amiga Workbench and GEM [1] icons, fonts and chrome were some of the most
aesthetically unpleasant designs ever. The proportions were all stretched out,
and the icons were mostly ugly.

With Kare's icons, even the pixelation looked cute.

[1] I was briefly enchanted with GEM because it made my DOS machine look and
feel like a Mac, but when I compared it to an actual Mac it looked horrible.

This is what GEM looked like:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/media/File:Gem1.png)

And this is what System 1 (original Mac OS) looked like:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Mac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png)

~~~
reaperducer
Heck, even GEOS looked better than GEM.

The Amiga desktop was such a missed opportunity. Take the first mass-market
computer capable of high-resolution graphics in 4,096 colors and make the
icons... wait for it... black, white, and orange on a blue background.

A friend of mine who was legally blind had an A1000. I sometimes wonder if it
was only for the icons.

~~~
bitwize
There's a reason for that color scheme. The OG Mac had a built-in, sharp,
monochrome CRT. The Amiga was designed to be usable with whatever TV happened
to be lying around. Hence the complementary pairs of black and white, and blue
and orange: the only colors that would read well on the oldest, grottiest,
junkiest b&w or color TVs. If you were editing HAM images in Deluxe Paint,
obviously you'd want a high-quality monitor for that. But if you didn't _have_
a high-quality monitor, the basic system UI would at least degrade well to be
usable with what you had.

Function over form is a part of the Amiga design. Its graphical shell is
called "Workbench" and not "Desktop" \-- it was thought of as a computer for
engineers and makers who were willing to forgo prettiness for practicality.

------
ajmarsh
Ah the icons of my youth, quite awesome. However, for me, the BeOS icon set
has not been toped. When I first installed BeOS I remember being totally blown
away by them.

[http://www.iconwanted.com/en/beos.html](http://www.iconwanted.com/en/beos.html)

~~~
cup-of-tea
Those are indeed much more beautiful and consistent. These all seem to live in
the same world while the Mac one seem to be designed one at a time.

------
santiagobasulto
> Every fifteen minutes or so, as I wrote this story, I moved my cursor
> northward to click on the disk in the Microsoft Word toolbar that indicates
> “Save.”

Gosh, cmd+S / ctrl+s doesn't work? Am I the only paranoiac that saves work
every few seconds? Are all developers like that?

~~~
dylan604
no, you're not alone. the following keyboard sequence is practically muscle
memory: ;<return><return><cmd-s>

if it's the end of a line of code followed quickly by another line of code, i
just keep going. if there's a spot in the code where i decide to separate with
a blank line, it's like a natural break point that deserves being saved. of
the voices in my head, the one i tend to listen to the most is the one in the
back screaming "Save, save often"!

~~~
shawabawa3
I have problems sometimes adding an import in golang, then habitually hitting
save which runs `go fmt` which removes the import. Sometimes it takes me 4
attempts before i can force myself to not save

------
canthonytucci
you can get signed Susan Kare prints on her website

[http://kareprints.com](http://kareprints.com)

no affiliation, just a fan

~~~
amiga-workbench
I've been looking for some artwork to hang in my bathroom and these are
adorable, will be grabbing a few.

------
Damogran6
A DogCow goes Moof.

"Moof!" is the universal 'ping' in our household, how loud, happy or sad it's
return "moof" lets us know how the rest of the family is doing.

------
philfrasty
Oh those memories, thank you Susan <3 I will never ever forget that bomb-icon.
It scared me to death. I would run to my dad and ask him what I should do /
had done wrong. So damn proud when I didn't have to ask him some time later bc
I was prepared. (5 to 7 years old maybe back then)

------
youpassbutter
The icons made the mac revolutionary? What a ridiculous exaggeration. The
icons were an improvement over the "textual" xerox icons but it wasn't what
made the mac revolutionary.

~~~
skookumchuck
I agree. People had been doing bitmapped icons at least since the 70's. The
Xerox Star (which the Mac copied) used them, too. The Mac's icons were good
but were evolutionary, not revolutionary.

------
no_u
This article reminded me of a Microsoft designer who had created many WMP
skins during the Windows XP era. I think she had a website/portfolio which I
can no longer find unfortunately.

Experimenting with Winamp and Windows Media Player skins is why I now design
and program UIs.

The Y2K aesthetic hits home better for me, because I grew up during that time
and not earlier.

------
chaostheory
Most of the New Yorker articles I read are the size of novellas, so it feels a
little strange that they have a very short article for someone who's had so
much impact on anything related to computers over the years. Almost everyone
in the world probably uses derivatives of her icons, with some direct and
others inspired.

I probably need to update her profile on my site as well:
[https://www.theymadethat.com/people/m1xhv6/susan-
kare](https://www.theymadethat.com/people/m1xhv6/susan-kare)

------
blakespot
Perhaps of interest here: [http://www.bytecellar.com/2012/09/11/susan-
kares-32x32-pixel...](http://www.bytecellar.com/2012/09/11/susan-
kares-32x32-pixels-of-steve-jobs-on-my-flesh-and-forever/)

------
Gimpson
I was stoked to get a set of napkins that she designed at a cute shop last
time to travelled to Portland:

[https://www.areaware.com/products/bitmap-textiles-
napkins?va...](https://www.areaware.com/products/bitmap-textiles-
napkins?variant=49036062660)

(They're on great cloth too! So hard to find cloth napkins that are absorbent
but also don't wrinkle.)

------
ape4
I can imagine Jobs yelling: make it cuter, damn it!

~~~
js2
He met his match with Paul Rand then:

> When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked
> him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve
> your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the
> solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”

[https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-
rand](https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand)

~~~
eumenides1
Watching the video with Steve Jobs talking about Paul Rand was really
fascinating.

My two takeaways: 1\. Paul Rand's IBM logo really was interesting because it
predated emojis, but that is what it is. 2\. Steve Jobs is a great speaker
(duh). When he needs to think and respond, the stillness is amazing. This is
very different to presentations because he is ready for it.

~~~
icebraining
His IBM logo is pretty clearly an hieroglyph (specifically phonograms), in my
opinion.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus)
(in the escort card example, the eye is also a replacement for "I").

(I mean the logo with the eye and the bee, of course, not the main IBM logo,
which he also designed)

------
amyjess
Her icons were such a huge part of my childhood. It's amazing how one person
had that much impact on the aesthetic I grew up with.

------
Simulacra
OH WOW! She helped create the magical world of my childhood! That is amazing.

------
ezequiel-garzon
Why was the title changed?

------
patrickg_zill
I always thought that the Keith Ohlfs designed NeXt icons, and his later
designs for WebTV, were good also.

------
intrasight
The icons of my first computer. Has been a long time since I saw them.

------
common_
She also designed the icons used on Facebook for their now-defunct Gifts.

------
omegaworks
Trashcan / Fat Trashcan was brilliance :)

------
nimbius
mine hasnt smiled in six years since I installed Gentoo. If anything its a
haunted, war-weary stare as I casually insist it compile Chrome and LLVM
again. Its a sullen scowl as I compile the latest stub kernel and pack it
dutifully alongside dozens of others in the EFI partition.

------
ebbv
Her work is extremely important to the Mac and to Apple, but I don't like hero
worship articles. It was a team effort, and there were a lot of people
responsible for making the Mac (and Apple) what they were/are.

When people wrote lots of hero worship articles about Jobs they missed the
contributions of Kare and others. This quote does the same thing:

> “If the Mac turned out to be such a revolutionary object––a pet instead of a
> home appliance, a spark for the imagination instead of a mere work tool––it
> is thanks to Susan’s fonts and icons, which gave it voice, personality,
> style, and even a sense of humor. Cherry bomb, anyone?”

Her work is important and great, but she didn't do it in a vacuum.

It seems like every profile of someone nowadays has to make them out to be a
singular genius who's work is of individual, utmost importance. It's not
enough to just say "Hey look at this cool stuff this person did!" They have to
be singularly responsible for something.

~~~
yarrel
Who assisted Kare that this article fails to mention?

~~~
ebbv
You missed my very simple point. It’s not that she had assistance in her role
(though I’d wager she did not create all her icons in a vacuum, instead
collaborating with others on the Mac team.)

I’ll restate my point plainly; hero worship articles about anyone who’s work
is actually part of a team (all the many articles about Jobs are much worse
than this one, for example) help paint a false picture in our society of the
lone genius. This false narrative is harmful just for being false, but also
helps lead people to feel like being a lone genius is an achievable goal and
what one should strive for. Which of course leads to failure.

My problem is not with Kare or someone writing about her. My problem is with
this author and many others writing in this way and denying the reality that
geniuses of all kinds collaborate with others and are enriched for it.

