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GUI Businesses Graphics Software Apple

Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate) 389

Posted by timothy from the mostly-love dept.
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."
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Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate) More

Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate)

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  • Too Late (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ken@WearableTech ( 107340 ) <ken@kenwillia m s j r . com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:05PM (#5633797) Homepage Journal
    This was /. before it even went live. Here is the google cache [google.com] but it won't let you see the pretty icons.

  • neato (Score:5, Funny)

    by SweetAndSourJesus ( 555410 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .toboRehTdnAsuseJ.> on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:05PM (#5633798)
    I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now.

    The one with the bomb icon on it.

    I don't wear it at airports.

    • Re:neato (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ponty ( 15710 )
      I have her "Be Good" t-shirt (with the Pope icon on it.) I always get good comments on that one.

      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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This Susan Kare chick is a MILF!

      Results for GIS of "Susan Kare" [mtholyoke.edu]

    • Re:neato (Score:3, Funny)

      by realperseus ( 594176 )
      My girlfriend is wearing Susan Kare apparel right now....

      Apparel with the bomb icon [cafeshops.com] on it......

      And yes, she wears them at airports..... *grin

    • Re:neato (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:44PM (#5634527) Homepage
      I have a T-Shirt that says...

      "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)

    by mekkab ( 133181 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:05PM (#5633803) Homepage Journal
    Slashdotted without a comment in sight!

  • Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dekraved ( 60562 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:05PM (#5633805) Homepage
    On the part of the site that was working, the pixel fonts reminded me of a time I tried to make Microsoft Word have the look of the old DOS Wordperfect. I managed to make the background blue, though it was really bright, and I managed to make the text gray. But I couldn't find the right monospaced, pixelly font. Has anybody else tried to do this, or am I just psycho? I thought that Wordperfect was much more fun to write in. I always felt like Doogie Howser.

    (Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)
  • ...the icon I'm staring at trying to look at this already-slashdotted page? Did she make this one too?

  • If you click the Windows 3.0 icons (Score:5, Funny)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:06PM (#5633808) Homepage
    If you click the Windows 3.0 icons you get an error. Its so cool that she managed to emulate windows on her web page :)

    Seriously though when the /.ing has died down I think it will really be worth a look even for a retro kick. She designed the solitare cards for God's sake. How many hours of my life has that accounted for? :)

    Rus

  • Evidently... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hanji ( 626246 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:07PM (#5633815)
    Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...
    • Well, I figured if her server could handle being a "Yahoo Pick of the Day" it could handle a slashdotting.

      Eh... wrong again!

  • Yay for Graphic Designers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArcSecond ( 534786 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:08PM (#5633829)
    I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.

    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)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:30PM (#5634016)
      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.

      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 :-)

      • Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?

        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)

          by WillAdams ( 45638 )
          Correct.

          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

      • 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.)

        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:2, Interesting)

        by flagstone ( 464079 )
        I interned for a summer at an Apple site in Campbell CA doing some graphic design, MM Director presentations, that kind of thing. We burned some out to CDs, back when that meant writing the data out to a Bernoulli disk or somesuch, then heading over to the washing-maching sized unit to try to create a test disk, then back to correct the formatting, etc, etc.

        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)

        by Phroggy ( 441 ) <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @08:05PM (#5634650) Homepage
        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.)

        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:Yay for Graphic Designers (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20*20 pixels (or whatever)... Kids today. 20*20 pixels - In my day we had a 1*1 pixel, and it was black all the time. And we loved it.

  • Talk about an audience (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:08PM (#5633836)

    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.

    • I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples:

      The cross.

      National flags.

      The gold-star sticker.
    • Actually I've always been very impressed by icon artists. The skill required to represent something in a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel box and make it recognizable (at least the good ones) was like magic. If you look at many icons up close, they quickly start looking like a random pattern of pixels, how one visualizes how that random pattern should be arranged to look like a hand holding a pen writing on a piece of paper is very cool.
    • Yep, if you ignore the people who do engraving for the world's coins and paper money, I'd have to agree. Although I would have to say that money art is highly politicized compared to computer OS icons...

  • frowny mac (Score:4, Funny)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:08PM (#5633838)
    I'll never forget the first time I saw the "sad Mac" icon during bootup. It made me chuckle and would have been even more amusing had it not been for the fact that my system would no longer boot.

    I stopped using macs soon after that.

  • elsewhere too (Score:2, Informative)

    by Yakk ( 6267 )
    She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger [danger.com] (who make the hiptop/sidekick [hiptop.com]).

  • More Icons (Score:3, Interesting)

    by T-Kir ( 597145 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:10PM (#5633855) Homepage

    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.

    • It's still there! It is called moricons.dll

      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 :)

    • You mean moricons.dll?

      I was disappointed that despite the file name, none of the icons depicted composer Ennio Morricons...

  • Some of her icons at images.google.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:10PM (#5633856) Homepage
    If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images [google.com], you'll find quite a few examples.

  • Google Cache (Score:5, Informative)

    by Torqued ( 91619 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:10PM (#5633858) Journal
    Karma whoring mode ON:

    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]

  • Yahoo + /. Great. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Daniel_Staal ( 609844 ) <DStaal@usa.net> on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:12PM (#5633869)

    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)

    by Rob Parkhill ( 1444 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:22PM (#5633946) Homepage
    Some of the best icons ever created were by Keith Ohlfs for NeXTstep. Amazing what he could pack into 64x64 2-bit greyscale pixels.

    Check out his latest work at Pixelsight [pixelsight.com]

  • mother of solitare! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:23PM (#5633956)
    you're the cause of so much wasted time (outside of /. ;)

  • Compressible art (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:24PM (#5633962)

    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)

    by SoupIsGoodFood_42 ( 521389 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:43PM (#5634096)
    Moof! Says the dogcow [storybytes.com].

  • Forget Icons, she designed Control Panel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:43PM (#5634099) Homepage Journal
    That's right, everything you needed [kare.com] to customize your computer's behavior, condensed into a single window 312x155 (roughly) pixels in size. What's more, all the functions are discoverable, neither instruction nor a help file is necessary to use it. It's perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of efficient information display ever realized on a personal computer, plus interactivity thrown in for good measure.
  • since that's been incorrect for years. Of course, it will probably be replaced with a pyramid with a eye on top of it soon.
  • to create a slashdotted icon?

  • Icons! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pilferer ( 311795 )
    This is what Linux needs (i.e., gnome/kde) - some GOOD icons. I'm sorry, but the stuff that's being used now is crap. A mix of artsy, well drawn crap with crapy crap. This woman's icons both a) LOOK GOOD, and b) convey MEANING...

    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)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:20PM (#5634369) Homepage
    Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.

    Here's a picture [abnormal.com]

  • ObSlashdotting (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spunk ( 83964 ) <sq75b5402@sneakemail.com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:22PM (#5634382) Homepage
    Her icon for "500 Internal Server Error" leaves much to be desired.

  • How did she design them? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:51PM (#5634568) Journal
    Wouldn't it be interesting to learn that she designed the Windows 3.1 icons on Mac Paint? :)

  • Why isn't Susan Kare better known? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @08:43PM (#5634827) Homepage Journal
    She is one of the reasons why the original Mac was such a mind-blower. Those little 32 x 32 icons were so eloquent. Anyone could understand what they meant just by a glance. And they were little black and white pixels designed on a 32 x 32 pixel grid.

    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)

    by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @08:44PM (#5634829)
    ...is perhaps less well known. David C. Smith created them as part of his Pygmalion [umd.edu] system. He then reused the concept in helping to create the Xerox Star [unisa.edu.au]. Of course, the Xerox UI begat the Macintosh UI, etc., etc.

  • The Day the Macintosh Came Out... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mstout ( 661009 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @09:40PM (#5635095)
    I was demoing it to an excited crowd at Macy's Computer Store within their store at Union Square/San Francisco. I was showing off MacPaint when someone asked me to do the tennis shoe in the brochure; an intricate drawing. When I hesitated a vivacious young woman stepped out of the crowd, grabbed the mouse from me and drew that shoe. It was Susan. She showed us all a lot of tricks that day. I guess neither she or I are still in our twenties anymore.

    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)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @09:07AM (#5637419)
    When you think about the folks on the original Mac project, it's quite stunning. Steve, Susan, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Jef Raskin, Bruce Horn... The entire working team was less than 100 people, they got so right, that they started a revolution that is still topic #1 on how computing gets done - TRULY personal computing, interface and intuitive apps. It's as if Henry Ford had produced the 57 Chevy Bel Air instead of the Model T.

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