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Susan Kare
Susan Kare | 1954
Kare was ‘the woman who gave Apple a face’. She studied fine art at New York University in 1978. She then worked for the Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco before moving to Apple in 1983. She designed the first icons for the Apple Macintosh and she had an influence on the operating system’s metaphoric interface that is still used today. She created the famous wastebasket, the wristwatch, ‘Happy Mac’, the dog ‘Moof’ and ‘Clarus the Dogcow’. She also created the Apple symbol on the command key and icons like the lasso and paint bucket and many more pictograms. She designed the typefaces ‘Geneva’, ‘Monaco’ and ‘New York’, all of which have enjoyed lasting popularity as system fonts. The font ‘Chicago’— the most prominent typeface used for the interface of the ‘Classic Mac OS’ as well as the first four IPod generations — this is her most famous font design. She also worked for Windows to help create the current status of interface design. The MoMA called her a ‘pioneer and influential forces in computer iconographer’, she since designed thousands of memorable icons using the minimalist grid of pixels. The reason for her success was her use of interface graphics being more like road signs than illustrations and not following fashionable trends. After leaving Apple, she became one of the first employees at NeXT as a creative director, it was another firm founded by Steve Jobs. She worked for a while as an independent graphic designer from 1988 until getting a position at Chumby Industries. In 2001, she was a recipient of the Chrysler Design Award.
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