Susan Kare's icon sketches. Susan Kare/Milanote.com
“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”-Susan Kare
Creative Process
During her time at Apple, Kare mostly worked on icons for the first Macintosh computer. The process of coming up with ideas mainly started with just a pen and paper. She would use gridded paper since all the icons were made out of 8 or 16-bit pixels. Kare liked to make her designs as easily understood as possible such as the garbage can for deleting your files, and a magnifying glass to zoom in on the screen. Kare once shared a story about coming up with the Mac’s command key icon. She was looking through a symbol dictionary and found an interesting icon that symbolized a campsite in Sweden. Then years later, when she went on a trip to Sweden, she saw her icon all over the country, suggesting that there are nearby campsites to stay in. Although that one icon’s meaning was somewhat abstract, Kare continues to strive to make icons as clear and as universally understood as possible. “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” -Susan Kare for Designboom (2014).
The command icon's orign. Milanote.com
After Apple & Now
After Apple and NeXt, Kare went on to design for multiple big companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Sony, and Intel. In 2003, she became one of the four chosen to ender the Citizen Coinage Advisory Committee to design coins for the United States Mint. Since 2008, the store inside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City has carried stationery, notebooks, and merchandise featuring Kare's designs. In 2015, the MoMA acquired her original notebooks sketches of the first Macintosh icons. That same year, Kare joined Pinterest as a product design lead. In 2018 she helped design The Point, a cafe directly inside Pinterest's San Francisco headquarters. Just as recently as February 2021, Kare became a Design Architect, a new role added specifically for her, at Niantic Labs. Kare also sells signed and numbered fine art prints located at kareprints.com.
Susan Kare's prints. Kareprints.com
