Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate) 389
bughunter writes "One of today's Yahoo Daily Picks is the personal exhibit of Susan Kare: the mimimalist creator of most of the original Macintosh icons then, later, the iconic elements for Windows 3.0, and she didn't stop there. More than just icons, her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious - trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over. (I can personally attest that the Mac System 6 beachball is burned into my soul...) She deserves some recognition of her own."
Too Late (Score:3, Informative)
neato (Score:5, Funny)
The one with the bomb icon on it.
I don't wear it at airports.
Re:neato (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really want to be impressed, check out her five dots and six dots fonts. They're beautiful. I use them regularly for detail work in my webpages (including my homepage.) Just great. Well worth the money.
Yeah, and I'd hit it! (Score:2, Informative)
Results for GIS of "Susan Kare" [mtholyoke.edu]
Re:neato (Score:3, Funny)
Apparel with the bomb icon [cafeshops.com] on it......
And yes, she wears them at airports..... *grin
Re:neato (Score:5, Funny)
"BOMB TECHNICIAN. IF YOU SEE ME RUNNING, TRY AND KEEP UP."
I wore it into an airport without even realizing what I was wearing (I was picking up a friend.)
Nobody ever said anything about the shirt.
And this is how you repay her?! (Score:5, Funny)
Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word? (Score:3, Interesting)
(Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)
Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word? (Score:2)
Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word? (Score:2)
Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word? (Score:3, Informative)
You'll find all the Microsoft free web fonts (inc. Andale Mono) at corefonts.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] - all perfectly legal, btw, and even with the option of an rpm package.
What about.... (Score:2)
If you click the Windows 3.0 icons (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously though when the
Rus
Evidently... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Evidently... (Score:2, Funny)
Eh... wrong again!
Re:Evidently... (Score:3, Informative)
Yay for Graphic Designers (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
Cultural problems (Score:5, Informative)
Some folks may remember the happy mac actually winked at you during startup in one of the OS 8 versions. It was quickly yanked- Apple supposedly got a backlash(or feared one) from cultures/countries where winking is offensive; search on google and you'll find a ton of links about it.
Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)
Random trivia- most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team. My 660AV's ROM contained an image of the team(much larger) at a beachparty. It is so sad to see that easter eggs have pretty much been killed off for years now in apple hardware/software.
Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?
Obligitory slashdotting joke: Her site could use the SPOD right about now :-)
Re:Cultural problems (Score:2)
I don't believe she did- the Spinner in OS X is a cleaned up version of the Spinning Winchester/CD of Death in NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and older version of OS X.
Re:Cultural problems (Score:3, Informative)
Susan Kare left NeXT before doing much at all w/ the interface.
The initial version of Workspace.app was coded up by Chris Franklin, and of course, Keith Ohlfs did the icons (and a spiffy bitmap terminal font), as well as a (buggy) program of that name.
William
Re:Cultural problems (Score:3, Funny)
Heh, I remember my science teacher in high school getting those when he accidently plugged his keyboard into a s-video port (or something of the like) They were pretty cool. I do remember it took
Re:Cultural problems (Score:3, Funny)
anything but the comforting Mac "bong" would scare the hell out of me
Wow, that's a good use for one of the old one piece Macs. I imagine it's much more stylish than an IBM compatible bong.
Re:Cultural problems (Score:2, Interesting)
At any rate I remember trying out a test disk on one of the Macs at the end of the day, only the formatting was of course incorrect and the machine fro
Re:Cultural problems (Score:4, Funny)
The replacement sound is screeching brakes and a big explosion played at full volume. I don't think they changed it because the old sound was too scary.
Re:COD sample? (Score:5, Informative)
I found copies of both the crash sounds, and the startup sounds here [tcp.com]. I recommend the 'Crash Mac Quadra' file.
Re:Yay for Graphic Designers (Score:2, Funny)
Talk about an audience (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd never really thought of icon creators as artists before, but I suppose they deserve recognition with the more familiar artists.
Just think: together with the "NBC Peacock" guy and a handful of other logo creators, Susan Kare's "art" has probably been viewed and used my more people, for more hours, than any conventional artistic works in human history... and all in the space of two short decades.
Re:Talk about an audience (Score:2)
The cross.
National flags.
The gold-star sticker.
Re:Talk about an audience (Score:2)
Re:Talk about an audience (Score:2)
Depends how you define "art" (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples: The cross. National flags. The gold-star sticker.
I'm not sure you can define the cross, or national flags, or other extremely common symbols as "art", unless you want to stretch stretching the definition to the point of absurdity... i.e. saying that "art" includes all human symbols and structures that can be represented visually. Is the symbol of a circle "art"? How about a white flag, or a crescent moon?
What distin
Re:Depends how you define "art" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Talk about an audience (Score:2)
Re:Talk about an audience (Score:2)
frowny mac (Score:4, Funny)
I stopped using macs soon after that.
elsewhere too (Score:2, Informative)
More Icons (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
Re:More Icons (Score:2)
On my WinME box here, it's 82 KB, XP's is 206 KB for some reason.
It's funny to look at the ancient icons still in there.. Paradox, Borland Turbo Pascal, Lotus 123, etc
so close (Score:2)
You mean moricons.dll?
I was disappointed that despite the file name, none of the icons depicted composer Ennio Morricons...
Re:More Icons (Score:2, Informative)
Some of her icons at images.google.com (Score:4, Informative)
Google Cache (Score:5, Informative)
Google Cache Links:
iconic elements for Windows 3.0 [Google Cache Link] [216.239.37.100]
original Macintosh icons [Google Cache Link] [216.239.37.100]
Re:Google Cache (Score:2)
Yahoo + /. Great. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good. So instead of just /.ing her, we do it on a day when the site's address has just been emailed out to thousands of link-starved people too.
Script Kiddies wish they had that much power.
The best icons (Score:4, Interesting)
Check out his latest work at Pixelsight [pixelsight.com]
mother of solitare! (Score:3, Funny)
Compressible art (Score:4, Interesting)
I can store the collective works of Shakespeare in a 10 Mb zip file. The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.
And yet, the collective works of Susan Kare could probably be compressed down to 1 or 2 kilobytes. Talk about minimalism!
MOOF! (Score:3, Informative)
Forget Icons, she designed Control Panel (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe /. can have her do a Flag Icon! (Score:2)
Maybe we can ask her... (Score:2)
Icons! (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's politely (after the nasty slashdoting) ask her to whip some up for us. I'd paypal a few $'s for some nice, professional KDE icons, wouldn't you?
Control panel icon (Score:4, Funny)
Here's a picture [abnormal.com]
ObSlashdotting (Score:5, Funny)
How did she design them? (Score:4, Funny)
Why isn't Susan Kare better known? (Score:5, Interesting)
Her later work for Windows and OS/2 never really duplicated the magic of her designs for the Mac. And the fact is we're still chasing their simple eloquence.
Ms. Kare should be celebrated equally along with the people who wrote the code under the hood. Next year the Mac will be 20 years old, and she was partially responsible for its brilliance.
Hmm...wonder if she could be persuaded to build a KDE theme...
The Father of Icons... (Score:3, Informative)
The Day the Macintosh Came Out... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember too her later being nominated as one of SF's Best Bachelorettes. Deservedly, as she was nice, attractive and talented.
Sculley and Jobs also came by that day too to see what kind of reception the Mac was getting.
Creative bunch... (Score:4, Interesting)
minimal (Score:2)
Re:500 Internal Server Error (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mac elitism (Score:5, Insightful)
Well around here I don't know of ANY IT guys that know any of that. Here IT guys usually refers to the systems support guys (you know, the ones that maintain the network, sets up computers, gives you flack for installing non standard software, etc). The stuff you mention usually is the domain of the developers (or engineers if you prefer).
BTW, the Happy Mac was the icon you saw when your Mac passed all it's boot checks and was booting "normally" (vs the Sad Mac which you saw if your machine was hosed).
Re:Mac elitism (Score:5, Insightful)
How does knowledge of how a btree works help someone figure out a driver issue? There is a huge difference in having a basic understanding of how software environments work vs specific algorithms (which is the the OP referred to). What would an IT person be coding to require them to know about the complexities of freeing/allocating memory. Hell, the current thinking is that we don't want PROGRAMMERS (Java, C#, HLL, scripting, etc) to have to deal with such issues, let alone the guy who unpacks the Dell and installs Office a dozen times a day.
Good admins are programmers/engineers, too. That makes them more expensive, but they can be much more efficient and flexible that way.
I disagree. Anyone who knows any more than very basic programming will probably be a programmer. You get paid more and you put up with a lot less sh*t, assuming of course you can find a job right now, in which case they would settle for an IT job to pay the bills. The only time I see programmers act as IT guys is in small shops that can't afford full time IT folk (or if their IT folk are like many of the IT folk I've met and sometimes take, umm, a while shall we say to get what seems like the most basic things done, like add more ram to your system). And I would never let an IT guy near any code (other than os scripting).
The Happy Mac icon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mac elitism (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"
I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on
As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.
Re:Mac elitism (Score:3, Funny)
A B-Tree is stuffing a lot of Happy Macs to a lot of 'X's, so you can smash them faster because of their physical nearness. But keep them in countable pile, so you don't lost track of them.
A two-handed clock algorithm is a attempt at stopping a clock with both hands, which bears the problem that one hand is catching the other.
And Google is the answer [wired.com] to all questions [google.co.jp]
Whe
Mac viral icons (Score:2, Interesting)
As an example, I was bored waiting for someone I carpooled with in college, so I started diddling around on one of the campu
Re:Mac elitism (Score:2)
Re:Mac elitism (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing.
I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.
If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.
It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about
What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.
Re:Mac elitism (Score:2)
Re:Beach ball? (Score:2)
Re:Beach ball? (Score:2)
Spinning technicolor pizza of death.
Pinwheel of pain
Oh, the aagony.
Re:Beach ball? (Score:4, Informative)
It was copied widely in numerous popular 3rd party applications, but you are correct in that the official wait cursor for the OS was the watch cursor.
The spinning disc cursor used in OS X is a descendent of the wait cursor from NeXTStep, which was originally used to indicate that the Magneto-Optical disc was in use.
Re:Beach ball? (Score:3, Informative)
My first dealing with OS X had this spinning icon appear after opening a file, and it brought back memories of the older NeXT operating system I used to use back in the 90's.
I was rather sad to see it go in the current version of OS X, I always considered it a sort of tribute to OS X's beginnings.
Re:Beach ball? (Score:2)
Re:Beach ball? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Collective subconscious (Score:2)
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:2)
Thus not only is it easier to recognize a trashcan over the word trashcan, but you immadiately intuit that you can put things into a trash can, move a trashcan and so forth.
Some people confused this aspect of UI to mere metaphor. This led to all sorts of horrible interfaces - many that pushed metaphor. The problem was that the power of ico
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:2, Interesting)
Icons are nice to learn where things are. Eventually the muscle memory takes over and they become unnecessary. You could change my trashcan icon to a picture of anything and I would still drag files to it because I know that that's where the trash is.
I modified the icon bar in Mail.app the way I liked it and have been using it that way for about a year now. I recently mucked it up and had to reinstall it. I modifed the icon bar again, but didn't put the "delete" button back in the same spot. Good thing the
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:2)
Sorry, but you're wrong.
Here's a revelation for you: people are different.
I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons.
Well, I can much more quickly find a text label in a sea of other text labels, than an icon I know in a sea of other icons. Does that make you "wrong"? No. People are different. This isn't "right" or "wrong". Deal with it.
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though you are trying to look as if you know something about UI and usablility, you obviously don't know anything.
Score -1, misleading.
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:2)
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection.
You've never played DDR, or maybe even video games, have you? When you're familiar with it, processing an image is pretty much instantaneous, not that it's terribly slow in the first place for simple stuff like this.
Re:Icons are Evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
A poorly made set of icons can indeed be worse than text. I think the really crucial element is whether different icons or wordcons are easily distinguishable. Your brain can easily pick out unique features. for example:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOQOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
notice how that T is much easier to spot that that Q? Icons that all look similar will be more difficult to pick out than words. However, to some extent, text looks like text looks like text, and a set of icons that have been designed to be easily distinguishable from each other will be easier for most people to pick out than a bunch of wordcons. Yes, there is a learning curve where you have to figure out what the icons mean, but I typically learn that pretty fast, and then I process icons faster than text. I would say that once they are learned, you're stripping away a "level of indirection". After all, kids who haven't learned to read yet can process pictures... you learn how to do that very early.
As an aside, people read lowercase, serifed fonts faster than uppercase sans-serif fonts because uppercase sans-serif fonts have fewer distinguishing features for each letter. Your speed of reading, or your speed of picking out icons, doesn't happen on a conscious level. Even if you're annoyed by icons, they might be helping you anyway.
Your point about the trashcan icon is kind of interesting, and true. The point of an icon is that it evokes a general concept. A trashcan icon that is too detailed can make you think of a particular trash can, or a particular type of trashcan -- a simple one should just make you think of the platonic form of trashcan. It should work sort of like the word "trashcan", except that you can read it faster, and tell it apart from other icons more easily. (That's why the simplicity of Kare's icons is so awesome.) So yes, it would work much better if it's appearance were consistent across OS's.
The idea of trying to pick a tool in photoshop using printed names -- "paintbrush, history brush, pencil" -- instead of icons makes me shudder.
Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for? (Score:2)
Simple: "cut". You could fit that into 11x5 pixels and it would still be clearly readable.
Tooltips are not that useful because you can only see one at a time, and first have to float the mouse over a button. This is very different to seeing all available options spelt out on the screen at once.
Labels AND icons just take up lots of screenspace. This is fine for desktop icons, but not for toolbars. I agree with parent poster, but mostly about toolbars, and not icons in general. Toolbar icons are mostly mean
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Interesting)
In terms of the official busy cursor, you're right, it was a wristwatch.
Re:Obviously... (Score:2)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:4, Funny)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2, Funny)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2)
I think that's kinda the point, doing so much with so little, especially considering that she was making squares look like curves. If you can create better looking icons than hers while subject to the same conditions and limitations I'm sure we'd all enjoy seeing them (ascii goatse.cx does NOT count)
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2)
I contend that she did nothing special because if she didn't do it, someone else would have and the results would have been identical because of those limitations.
Re:a 16x16 canvas (Score:2)
True. Good thing Susan Kare had a 32x32 canvas to work with (the size of all Mac icons from the original 128K Mac through OS 9.1).
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Burning Mac, perhaps?
Re:You gotta love Steve Jobs' overkill. (Score:2)
Re:Already? (Score:4, Informative)
http://kare.com/images/ [kare.com]