Susan Kare

Susan Kare, born in 1954, is an American artist and graphic designer. She studied fine art at Mount Holyoke College and went on to earn both an M.A. and Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University. After completing her studies she worked as a curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, before shifting into design. In 1986 she joined Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer as the company’s tenth employee, and later established her own practice, Susan Kare Design, developing iconography and identity systems for IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and other clients. Since 2015 she has served as Creative Director at Pinterest, while also producing textiles and home goods with Areaware and offering limited-edition prints of her most recognizable icons through Kare Prints.

Her work in computing began in 1982, when Andy Hertzfeld, a childhood friend working on the Macintosh project, invited her to join Apple. With no background in software, she accepted out of curiosity and a wish to apply her visual training to a new medium. Before she had access to Apple’s in-house bitmap editor, she sketched icons by hand on graph paper, mapping each square as a pixel. Drawing on her experience with mosaics, needlepoint, and printmaking, she approached each bitmap as a visual puzzle that had to communicate its function at a glance. Among her first designs were the smiling computer that greeted users at startup, the trash can for discarding files, and the paintbrush for MacPaint. At Apple she went on to create countless icons, typefaces, and screen elements that defined the Macintosh’s friendly personality. She designed Chicago, the system font that shipped with the original Mac, along with Monaco and Geneva. Her icons included the command key symbol, the lasso and paint bucket for image editing, and Moof the Dogcow, an inside-joke mascot that became a cult favorite among developers. She also drew the dreaded bomb icon, which appeared during system crashes, and the Happy Mac startup icon, which greeted users with a smile. Rather than striving for realism, her work emphasized clarity and wit, making complex functions legible through simple visual metaphors. By giving the Macintosh a visual language that was functional and playful, she helped humanize personal computing at a time when most interfaces were intimidating, advancing Steve Jobs’ vision of “the computer for the rest of us.”

Kare’s designs stand among the milestones of digital graphics. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the London Design Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, among others. In 2022 the Musée de l’Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique in Lyon presented Icônes by Susan Kare, a survey of her iconography. Her honors include the Chrysler Design Award, the AIGA Medal, and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and she was named to I.D.’s Forty list of influential designers. In 2018 Medium recognized her among the technologists who shaped the modern world. MoMA describes her as “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer,” a legacy evident in the fact that her symbols still appear in everyday software decades later.