Graphic designer Susan Kare is the “woman who gave the Macintosh a smile.” 1 She is best known for designing the distinctive icons, typefaces, and other graphic elements that gave the Apple Macintosh its characteristic—and widely emulated—look and feel. The original Happy Mac was designed by chief Mac iconist Susan Kare in November 1983. She translated standard desk items into beautiful little bitmap icons.

Source: Interviewwith Susan Kare, 8 September 2000.

Designing Icons

Pang: Were you working on-site, in Cupertino?

Kare: Yes. I definitely learned on the job. As whenI went to Macintosh, there wasn't really an icon editor, but therewas a way to turn pixels on and off. I did some work on paper,but obviously it was much better to see it on the screen, so therewas a rudimentary icon editor. First they showed me how I couldtake the art and figure out the hex equivalent so it could bekeyboarded in. Then Andy made a much better icon editor that automaticallygenerated the hex under the icons. That was how I did the firstones. I think I did the fonts that way, going letter by letter,before we had a font editor.

Pang: Were you working on a Lisa?

Kare: No, on a Mac. Always on a Mac. Though my firstMac still had the Twiggy floppy disk drive. The Finder displayeda floppy, and had draggable titles and files.

I didn't really have much computer experience, but even thenI found that rudimentary Mac more appealing to me than the AppleII. I was a typical customer that they were trying to attract,someone for whom the graphical side of it would have been attractive.

Pang: Did Andy and others have a clear sense of whatkinds of icons they needed-- a trash can, files-- or was the designmore uncertain?

Kare: I recall that things were pretty much open. Thecursor existed. There was a paper with a folded corner. I thinkwhen I started there existed a trash can. I didn't invent that,Lisa had one, though I refined it to make it our trashcan. Since Lisa used pixels that weren't square, even if one hadwanted to use the exact same thing in Mac we would have had toadjust it.

Now it seems so ancient, thinking about about this. Usuallythey told me what concepts they needed, and I would try to comeup with a selection of things that might work. We would try themout, and the final design would evolve from there.

The documents icon existed-- the paper with the folded corner--and I thought it was good that documents look like documents;but I thought that applications needed to look more active. That'swhen I came up with the icon that has a hand holding a pencilagainst a diamond. With that, you could easily distinguish betweendocuments and applications. I worked on the earliest MacPainticon, which was a brush that was painting, where the documenticon included an image that would associate it with an application.

We never imagined how many, many icons there would eventuallybe. There were 256 number sets available for fonts, and that justseemed cavernous-- we used only a few, and assumed that numberwould accomodate third-party font development.

Metaphors

Pang: I know some of the metaphors for the interfacechanged over time: with Lisa, for example, the scroll bar is calledthe 'elevator' for a while. I imagine that if you callsomething an elevator rather than a scroll bar, or the name trashcan changes over time, that you would design different icons;or that if you designed a really cool icon, the name of a featuremight change.

Kare: When I came, the title bar was always called thetitle bar, and I spent a LOT of time working on different designsfor it. Should it have stripes, should it have little architecturaldetails on the side? We were trying to figure out what you doto highlight that name. I think the first font that I did wasvery much like Chicago-- we called it 'Elefont' at first,that was the placeholder name.

MacPaint was first called MacSketch, but I don't think thathad much effect on the icons. Later, doing MacWrite and MacProject,I think the ideas for those always pretty clear. We definitelytalked about naming things in menus, and Bill Atkinson would comein sometimes with features for MacPaint and ask,' What doyou think we should call this?' Now the lasso, I think maybeBill did call it a 'lasso,' and had the form with thelittle slip knot, to make it like a lasso. I refined his imageto the 'final' lasso.

For while there was going to be a copy machine for making acopy of a file, and you would drag and drop a file onto it tocopy it. That was visual for a while, but then it went away. Itturned out was hard to figure out what you could draw that peoplewould see as a copier. I drew a cat in a mirror, like 'copycat' [Pang laughs]-- I tried a few ideas that were not practical.

We took a very common sense approach. People would ask forsomething, and I would do what I thought would work. I do rememberalways trying-- and I still do to this day-- to provide a richselection of choices, and see what works.People would have differentsuggestions.

Collaborators

All the programmers with whom I worked in the Mac group werevery articulate, clever, creative, and had a lot of good ideas.I also had the relative luxury of being a designer, but not workingwith a large number of other designers. So it was a great opportunityto develop one's own ideas, and respond to other people's ideas,but not have a huge number of these things go through the classic'designed by committee' process.

Pang: So who were the people you worked with most?

Kare: Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, Donn Denman, BruceHorn-- I don't want to leave anyone out-- Larry Kenyon-- I'm thinkingof the room in which we sat-- Jerome Coonen, Bud Tribble-- I workedin the software group, and we had our own space. Patti Kenyonwas the software librarian; she was Patti King at the time. BillAtkinson usually worked at his house, and he came in at certaintimes. All great programmers. But I probably worked most closelywith Andy, and a fair amount with Bill. Andy usually was the requester.

But I also worked on other things. We had the Scrapbook, andI drew the images for the Scrapbook. I was sort of a single-sourcevendor at the time, so I did a lot of work for Creative Services.I did some things with people writing the manuals, and workedmainly Chris Espinosa and Clement Mok, Tom Hughes, and Ellen Romanafrom Creative Services.

Choosing Icons

Pang: How long would it take to design a selection ofpossibilities for a copier or trash can?

Kare: Sometimes hours, sometimes days.

Pang: Can you explain how the Icon Editor worked? Wasit like a piece of graph paper, and you clicked on the squaresto draw an image?

Kare: That's pretty much it. I don't even remember verymuch about it now, but it was a grid with squares that toggledfrom black to white. After a while, I started using MacPaint tomake the icons, and it had all the classic MacPaint features ofbeing able to see the image enlarged and actual size at the sametime, and being able to draw circles and lines and erase. I thinkwith the first icon editor you could only toggle pixels, so itwas great to use MacPaint.

Pang: So what was it that would define a really successfulicon? Did you have some sense going into the project of what youthought a good icon would look like?

Kare: It's not usually my way to say, 'This isit.' As I said, I tried to make a selection and get people'sopinions.

I like to think that good icons are instantly recognizable--even if someone's never seen it, you can ask them what it does,and they get it-- or it's so easy to remember that if someonetells you want it is once, it's easy to remember when you lookat it. I think that's a lot to ask of a symbol, that if you testedit everyone would all have

Susan Kare Mac Icons