Susan Kare

Creator of many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh, Kare is an artist and graphic designer whose iconic work includes the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket icons, and the Chicago typeface. She was born in Ithaca, New York and 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 the Museum of Modern Art.

Kare joined Apple Computer, Inc. in 1982 after receiving a call from her high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld. She was originally hired into the Macintosh software group to design user interface graphics and fonts; her business cards read "Macintosh Artist". Later, she served as a Creative Director in Apple Creative Services working for the Director of that organization, Tom Suiter.

Kare is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the original Macintosh operating system. 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 included the Chicago typeface (the most prominent user interface typeface seen in Classic Mac OS, as well as the typeface used in the first four generations of the Apple iPod interface), the Geneva typeface, the original monospace Monaco typeface, Clarus the Dogcow, the Happy Mac (the smiling computer that welcomed Mac users when starting their machines), and the symbol on the Command key on Apple keyboards.

After leaving Apple, she joined NeXT as the Creative Director and 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 Kare's 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 carried stationery and notebooks featuring her designs. Beginning February 7, 2007, Kare produced icons for the "Gifts" feature of the popular social-networking website, Facebook. She has headed a digital design practice in San Francisco and has sold signed prints at kareprints.com.