Susan Kare: How I Designed the Original Apple Mac Icons
Susan Kare, the legendary designer behind the original Macintosh's iconic visual language, shares her journey from art history to computing. She discusses the creation of typefaces like Chicago and memorable icons such as the Happy Mac and the Command key symbol. Drawing lessons from Steve Jobs, Paul Rand, and others, Kare highlights key design principles: focusing on meaning and memorability, embracing technical constraints, iterating constantly, and using just enough detail to ensure instant clarity and universal appeal in human-computer interaction.
Susan Kare, an iconographer and designer, despite an art history PhD and minimal prior computer knowledge, became instrumental in shaping the visual language of the original Macintosh. Her journey began when high school friend Andy Herzfeld, a system software programmer at Apple, invited her to design images and typefaces for an emerging computer.
Core Design Philosophy
Kare’s work is deeply influenced by graphic design legend Paul Rand, who advised her to “always focus on making things meaningful and memorable.” This philosophy, encapsulated as “have a good idea and then the form will follow,” guided her approach. The initial goal for the Macintosh was to create a computer “that anyone could use,” emphasizing understandability, friendliness, and the elimination of manual dependence.
Designing Within Constraints
Working under significant constraints—a 16x16 pixel black and white display—Kare embraced these limitations as opportunities for creativity. Her initial task was to improve the on-screen interface, including changing the ambiguous “do it” button to “OK.”
Typography: Chicago and Beyond
Her first font, Chicago, was designed to be tidy and legible using horizontals, verticals, and 45-degree angles within a 9-pixel height. The Macintosh’s innovative support for proportionally spaced fonts was a key advancement, enhancing readability significantly. Chicago notably found its way into the first iPod. Other fonts she created, New York (resembling Times Roman) and Geneva (like Helvetica), were given “world-class city” names at Steve Jobs’ insistence, replacing her initial, more local choices.
Iconography: MacPaint and the Happy Mac
Kare collaborated with Bill Atkinson on MacPaint, designing its icons and patterns. Andy Herzfeld developed a simple icon editor that allowed her to toggle bits and iterate rapidly, viewing both enlarged pixels and the 72 dpi output simultaneously. This tool, despite its simplicity, was “magical” for its iterative capabilities.
The Happy Mac, the smiling computer icon displayed during boot-up, was designed to reassure users that the system was starting correctly. Drawing inspiration from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Kare emphasized that simple, abstract icons become universal, allowing users to project themselves onto them. “The less detail you have, the more universal something is,” she notes, advocating for “a salient detail or two, but don’t lard it with a lot of extra stuff.”
Lessons from Design Challenges
Not all icons were successful. The Unhappy Macintosh and a bomb icon for system failures, intended for extremely rare occasions, were sometimes seen by users, causing genuine alarm (e.g., a caller fearing her computer would explode). This highlighted the critical need for iteration and considering user perception.
Product-specific icons, such as the printer with sprockets or the 3.5-inch floppy for ‘save,’ were prone to quick obsolescence. Kare advocates for enduring metaphors over literal product depictions, using “just enough detail” to make an idea clear and lasting.
The Command Key Symbol and Ancient Roots
When Steve Jobs deemed the use of multiple Apple logos on the keyboard as devaluing the brand, the “Apple key” became the “Command key.” Kare’s search for a suitable symbol led her to a “feature” symbol found in a library book, resembling a four-leaf clover or a cloverleaf highway. This abstract symbol, easy to draw in 16x16, was later discovered to have ancient roots in Swedish history, representing Borgolm Castle from above. This reinforced her belief that “not much new under the sun” exists in symbol design, with hieroglyphics and early bitmap fonts demonstrating similar grid-based communication.
Post-Apple Design Work
After Apple, Kare continued her pioneering work:
- Microsoft Windows 3.0: Designing for 16-color dithering to create subtle graphics, including Solitaire cards.
- General Magic: Experimenting with a more literal desktop metaphor featuring hallways and doors, though some ideas like “jars of text” proved less intuitive.
- Facebook Gifts: Creating digital gifts for purchase, learning that “cute trumped everything” in terms of popularity (e.g., teddy bears, kiss marks, penguins).
- Pinterest: Developing icons with subtle, non-irritating motion.
- Various logos and avatars: Including a “trash panda” for a stealth company, pixelated travel icons for Amtrak, and logos for games (Pikmin Bloom, Paradot) and a crypto wallet (Ledger).
Enduring Design and Life Lessons
Kare shared invaluable advice from mentors and colleagues:
- Paul Rand: “You don’t need that many fonts. You just have to know how to use them well.” He advocated for logos that engage with the product’s name and created the iconic NeXT logo for Steve Jobs under the condition of a single, accepted design for $100,000.
- Paul Saffo: “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance”—always allow extra time for projects.
- Her Father: “You have to be willing to hear no a lot of times” and “No one cares about your feelings when they’re giving you money,” pragmatic advice on securing funding.
- Daniel Nord: “Make it visual” or “Show, don’t tell” in discussions.
- Jean Pigozzi: Encouraged making “a little dent in the universe” and finding “something that was just plain fun.”
- Bud Tribble (quoting Alan Kay): “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” a fundamental UI principle.
- Steve Jobs: Advised appreciating the present, fostering a “pirate” mentality for the Mac team, and framing ease of use to empower users. He also gave some “bad advice,” like not buying Apple stock and downplaying the value of “bit twiddling” (which Kare cherished).
- Andy Herzfeld: When presenting to Jobs, offer multiple options so he feels involved and can choose, rather than reject a single idea.
- Evan Sharp (Pinterest): “Start with what’s obvious, then iterate.”
- Dennis Wang (Google): Don’t alter a logo playfully until it’s universally recognized.
Kare’s presentation underscores the blend of artistic intuition, practical constraints, iterative refinement, and a deep understanding of human perception that defines effective interface design, a legacy that continues to influence modern computing.