Susan Kare

Susan Kare (1954 - ) is a graphic designer and early pioneer of pixel art, who helped define the language of graphical user interfaces, and created many of the interface elements for the 80s Apple Macintosh. Born in Ithaca, NY, she went to Mount Holyoke College for her BA in art, and then received her Ph.D. in design from New York University. She moved to San Francisco for a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museum until she received a call from a friend from high school, Andy Hertzfeld, inviting her to work for Apple in 1982. She designed user interface graphics and fonts, including the Chicago typeface (used in Classic Mac OS and the first four generations of the iPod), the Geneva typeface, the Monaco typeface, the arrow, the paintbrush, the pointing hand, and the symbol on the Command key (which was commonly used at Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting sightseeing destination).. Her fonts were the first to challenge the monospace digital text: she spaced her letters proportionally. She went on to work for NeXT (Steve Jobs’ next company after Apple), working with Microsoft (where she created the card deck for Windows 3.0 solitaire game, as well as the icons for Notepad and various Control Panels) and IBM (where she created icons and design elements for OS/2). In 2007 she created the icons for Facebook’s “Gifts” feature (which initially donated profits to the Susan G Komen for the Cure Foundation). She was hired by Pinterest in 2015 as a product design lead in their creative department, responsible for web and app interfaces. In 2015 the MoMA acquired her archive of graph paper drawings which served as sketches when she worked for Apple. Her prints, stationery and notebooks are sold at the MoMA Art store. She currently heads a digital design practice in San Francisco.