Susan Kare - Week 2

Susan Kare, born in 1954, is an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. After receiving a Doctorate in Fine Arts from New York University in 1978, she moved to the San Francisco area to first work briefly as an Assistant Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, then as a Freelance Graphic Artist. Her career in user interface graphic design began when she worked for Apple Computer between 1983 and 1986. With the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pushed the world toward the graphic interface, which provides greater ease of use. A graphic interface allows an operator to control the computer by manipulating symbols displayed on its monitor, usually with a mouse or trackball.

Kare left with Steve Jobs to become Creative Director at NeXT Inc. After two years there, she began to freelance for companies such as Microsoft. She did many of the icons for windows 3.0, which was Microsoft's first successful attempt to reproduce a Macintosh-like experience on IBM-compatible personal computers. In 1989, she was a founding partner of Susan Kare LLP.
During the past years, she has drawn more than 2,000 icons for computers, coming up with dozens of symbols representing the commands ‘print’, ‘merge’ and ‘quit’. Her clients have included the leaders of the computer age: Apple, The Getty Technology Group, Intel, IBM, Sony Pictures, Yahoo, AT&T, Motorola Autodesk, Eazel Inc. and Microsoft.

She is a 2001 recipient of the Chrysler Design Award and currently heads a digital design practices in San Francisco and sells signed prints at kareprints.com.