At Cult of Mac, we pride ourselves on our obsessive love for everything Apple, which is why we’re crashing through the walls with excitement to have Apple pioneer, Susan Kare – the person responsible for creating most of the original Mac icons – designing this week’s cover.
Since 1983, the San Francisco-based designer has crafted thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Designed on a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their functions immediately and memorably.
Kare was working as a fine arts curator when she was recruited in the early 1980s by Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend, to design the look and feel of the first Mac, the first commercial computer with a GUI – which happens to celebrate its 30th birthday this week.
Influenced by road signs, her whimsical, easy-to-understand icons defined the visual language of computers for decades —such as the Trash Can, the Bomb, the Paint Can, to name a few
Kare later designed the Mac’s fonts, and then went to work for Steve Jobs at NeXT. She also designed icons for Microsoft’s Windows 3.0. More recently, she created a line of virtual gifts for Facebook, stickers for Path, self-published an art book, as well as a ton of wonderful prints she makes available on her site when she’s not out surfing.
Kare is widely recognized as the groundbreaking designer of graphical user interfaces, mostly because the meaning of her symbols were instantly apparent.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York praised Kare’s designs for being able to “communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”
Did she have any idea she was making history at the time?
“You can set out to make a painting, but you can’t set out to make a great painting,” Kare said in an interview. “If you look at that blank canvas and say, ‘Now I’m going to create a masterpiece’ — that’s just foolhardy. You just have to make the best painting you can, and if you’re lucky, people will get the message.”
We’ve featured her work heavily on the site, and oogled at the incredible prints available on her online store, but its truly an honor to have her work her craft on the Cult of Mac Magazine.
