Susan Kare
Susan Kare is an American graphic designer and artist who created the iconic icons, typefaces, and visual interface elements for the first Apple Macintosh, including the Chicago font and the Happy Mac startup icon. She currently serves as a design architect at Niantic Labs, having previously held creative roles at NeXT, Pinterest, and her own firm, Susan Kare Design. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of pixel art and graphical user interface design, and was awarded the AIGA Medal in 2018.
“We were trying to make a computer that anyone could use... it should be friendly because there were so many people there who in the Mac software group were just passionate about computers and kind of wanted to be evangelical about that.”
Source→“Andy Hertzfeld... recruited her to Apple... wrote the icon editor that made her work possible”
Source→“Usually I think you can be creative in any constraints. You can make some pretty fun art with beach trash while you're walking around... it's good to understand what the constraints are and then be excited about that as opposed to being upset that you don't have a thousand colors.”
Source→“A programmer named Steve Capps and I, Steve Capps sewed a black flag and I painted a skull and crossbones on it and put a striped apple as the eye patch and we went to work in the middle of the night and we flew that flag.”
Source→“Happy Mac is a play on the title of this excellent book by Scott McCloud which is about comics but really has so many good insights about user interface too.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.