Susan Kare may not be a household name, but millions of people are quite familiar with her work.  Her name has risen out of obscurity thanks in part to the new Walter Issacson biography of Steve Jobs.  Susan has a fine arts background and was recruited by her friend Steve Jobs to join Apple.  There she worked as a graphic designer for Apple starting in 1982.  Her work helped changed the way we use our computers, moving away from using text-based controls to icon-based interfaces.  Her work for the Macintosh is perhaps some of her most iconic including the trash can for discarding unwanted files and the smiley computer face.  She and Steve Jobs shared a desire to make the computer user friendly and even whimsical.

Those early icons were drawn by hand in sketchbooks because the codes for designing icons hadn’t been written yet.  Many of Susan’s early designs are echoed in the icons being used to this day.  She also changed the appearance of the documents we type.  Early fonts placed letters equally spaced apart without taking into account the width of the letter. Susan created the first font that spaced letters proportionally.

The artistry didn’t stop when she left Apple.  Susan continued to design icons for Microsoft Windows and even did work on Facebook gifts.  She recently published an art book featuring 80 of her favorite designs entitled ICONS.