Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

**Susan Kare** (0:07)
Hello, I'm Susan Kare, and now for something completely different. I've been an iconographer and designer, I've worked on a lot of tech projects, and I want to talk about a tech startup I worked for when, even though the Macintosh Group was part of Apple. But I think a lot of the experiences resonate with some of the topics that I've heard here today.
So I've been doing this for a while and love it. Here's a few things that I designed over the years. And it's funny because this was really a north star for the Macintosh Group. But when I reread it in the last couple of days, it just kind of reminded me of AI and so many things that are being developed now. And Paul Rand is a celebrated graphic designer no longer with us, he did the UPS logo and IBM logo and so many images that have persisted. And I was lucky to work with him. And something he told me was always focus on making things meaningful and memorable. And I think the heart of that is have a good idea and then the form will follow.
I was a total art major, didn't know anything about computers, and was lucky enough to work at Apple on the Macintosh as the Macintosh artist. And before I went to Apple, I was welding a life-size razorback hog for a museum in Arkansas. And I thought I was living my dream, going out to my garage, welding all day. But in truth, it was a little bit lonely, and I was glad I had the experience, but it kind of made me hungry for working with a team. And my high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld, was a system software programmer at Apple. And he knew I had worked on the yearbook and liked art. He said he needed some images to display on a new computer that was being worked on. And he showed me the display, which didn't have a case, and said, could I come in for an interview to work on some small symbols and some typefaces? And I said, sure. I thought it sounded great and really interesting and something I hadn't done before. So I thought about it. I had a little bit of typographical experience from working at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. I used a machine like this to make labels for exhibits. And I was pretty good at letraset, rubdown type. I could do it really straight and get the kerning right. But I went to the and I had a PhD in art history. So those were my credentials. And I went to the library in Palo Alto and took out some books about typography and some font sample books. And I actually brought them to my interview. Under my arm. So I would seem as if I knew what I was talking about. And Andy also suggested to me that it would be good if I could make some examples of essentially bitmap graphics, but using graph paper. And he didn't really specify what to make. So some things I made, like a pond with a boot and some pieces of paper. And you could see on this slide, there's a little bit of an ABC. But I just tried to make some examples. And these are more of the examples. Sort of funny because some of these really random things slightly influenced what we ended up using in the software.
So I spoiled the surprise, but I got the job. And I don't think anybody even asked me any questions about font design despite my prep. And in a funny twist of fate, as much as I had wanted to be an artist, now that notebook with those early icons that I took to my interview is in the permanent collection of MoMA. So it just, so hang on.
Definitely hang on to your stuff. So when I got to Apple, the first day, this screen was shown to me to say, this is what it's your job to improve. And fonts and the round racks that are on the five and a quarter inch floppy drawing are, could become icons, but they were able with a cursor to click and drag those around. So it already had a little, seemed kind of magical to me. And we definitely changed do it to okay, because do it was a little off color and people read it as dolt. So I wanted to make a new system fine and make some icons.
So, and it was told to me, it was very sincere that we were, trying to make a computer that anyone could use. So I felt good about that because I was in that group. Even though I am happy to work on and have worked on many projects that weren't for me, but I like that about this project. And we wanted it to be as understandable as possible. So you wouldn't necessarily need a manual. And that it should be friendly because there were so many people there who in the Mac software group, where I was, who were just passionate about computers, but and kind of wanted to be evangelical about that.