Susan Kare: The Art Major Who Drew the Mac

Before any of the Macintosh icons existed, Kare was in Arkansas welding a life-size razorback hog for a museum, a job she describes as living her dream but "a little bit lonely." The isolation left her hungry to work with a team, which is what made the next phone call land.

The call came from Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend who was a system software programmer at Apple. He knew she had worked on the yearbook and liked art, and he needed images to display on a new computer. When he showed her a display with no case, she was looking at the machine that would become the Macintosh.

Her formal credentials were a PhD in art history and typographical experience making labels at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, where she used a Letraset-style rub-down machine. She was, in her words, pretty good at it — "I could do it really straight and get the kerning right." For the interview she checked typography and font sample books out of the Palo Alto library and carried them under her arm "so I would seem as if I knew what I was talking about."

Hertzfeld told her to make examples of bitmap graphics on graph paper but didn't specify what to draw. She produced a pun with a boot and pieces of paper, plus a little bit of an alphabet, and some of those "really random things" slightly influenced what ended up in the software.

She got the job, and by her recollection nobody even asked her a single question about font design despite all the preparation. The notebook of early icons she brought to that interview now sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which leads to her advice to keep your early work: "definitely hang on to your stuff."

On her first day she was shown a screen and told this was her job to improve. On the drawing of a 5.25-inch floppy, fonts and rounded rectangles could become icons, and a cursor could click and drag them around — something that already seemed kind of magical to her.

One of the first changes was a menu command: "do it" became "okay" because the original phrasing was a little off color and people read it as "adult." The stated mission was to make a computer anyone could use, understandable enough that you wouldn't necessarily need a manual.

She felt good about that mission because she was in the group driving it. The Mac software team was passionate about computers and wanted to be evangelical about them, and making the machine friendly was part of the assignment.

The working constraint was 16 by 16 pixels in black and white. Her framing is that you can be creative in any constraints, comparing it to making fun art out of beach trash while you're walking around.

She draws the line between two attitudes: being excited about what the constraint allows versus being upset that you don't have a thousand colors. The first images made under those limits included a lasso, drawn as a way to surround an irregular region, plus other art tools.

The constraint era keeps echoing. The Paris street artist Space Invader does mosaic work and, in her description, has borrowed liberally from early Macintosh material — something she says made her really happy.

Jobs let Andy and Susan keep city names but told them to 'at least call them world class cities'. She found the existing on-screen type "all jaggedy" and made it tidier using horizontals, verticals and 45-degree angles. The lowercase X still makes her wince, but the other letters mostly fit the system.

The Mac could do proportionally spaced fonts, which earlier displays could not — before, "the M was really squished and then the I was really wide." She says she didn't realize what a big deal this advancement was at the time. Chicago went into the title bar and later reappeared on the first iPod, so the team was effectively designing the first iPod without realizing it.

The names New York and Geneva exist because she wanted a Times Roman kind of thing and a Helvetica kind of thing; there was also a monospace font. The city names came from the Paoli local line through the Philadelphia suburbs, where she and Andy went to high school — Paoli, Wynnewood, Rosemont. Jobs came by one afternoon at the end of the day to walk around the software group and said city names weren't bad, but at least call them world class cities.

Bill Atkinson wrote MacPaint, which Kare calls her favorite program, and she collaborated with him on icons and patterns. Atkinson also developed an early scanner, which is how the geisha image from a woodcut Steve Jobs owned got into the machine.

The control panel used animation for changing settings, aiming to communicate what would happen and what your choices were. They could use sound and speed but tried to avoid text so the panel could be international without a separate localized version.

She is blunt about the tooling: "we didn't have that many really great tools for art, but whatever. We forged ahead." Once at Apple she no longer had to design on graph paper, because Hertzfeld wrote her an icon editor.

She describes a printout of the icon editor with no tools at all, where you toggled bits. You could see a greatly enlarged image alongside how the icon looked at 72 dpi, and the tool automatically generated the hex code for an icon that she could type in and see on screen.

Her reaction was that it was just magical — no 20 levels of undo, no shapes, but you could iterate without an eraser.

People came and sat so she could do their portrait in 32 by 32. There was no way to get a photo or even a drawing into the machine, so the portraits had to be done from life. Fel Williams is at the top right and Ashton Kutcher sits under him, though she notes they did not sit for their portraits; design leader John Miada is among the less famous faces on the page. She still enjoys making those portraits and finds it amazing that in a thousand dots, with a lot of iteration, you can get some semblance of a resemblance.

She was told that as an alternative to the Happy Mac, in the extremely unlikely event something went wrong, there should be an unhappy Macintosh. She drew a sick, hungover-looking Mac, and felt she could be irreverent "because no one was going to see this. At least that's what I was told."

For total system failure she drew a bomb. She thought it might be kind of funny, like a Bugs Bunny type of bomb — but people did see it. She was working in the software group's glass room, which they called the fishbowl, when the receptionist relayed a call from a person who needed to talk to someone in the software group.

The caller was worried she was looking at a bomb and asked whether her computer was going to explode. Kare says she felt a little guilt, and the moral of the story, in her telling, is lots of iteration.

She did MacPaint first because it was a process, so it looked active and could be paired with a document that resembled it. In her phrase, the system was kind of a verb and a noun.

That system was built for maybe half a dozen applications; the team did not have the mindset that there would be thousands of applications. For alerts she cropped a person rather than drawing a person with a little square head — a deliberate crop that hid gender, age and hairdo.

She had only ever seen a sand timer as an egg timer, so they made a watch cursor instead of an hourglass. Her framing was that it was the 80s and it was time to update these things.

The print icon was a different story. It was kind of a trap: the ImageWriter did have paper with holes up the sides fitting sprockets turned by a big knob, but that was too much detail. She says the print icon would have had a much longer lifespan if she had made it simpler, and her general rule is not to show pictures of a particular product design in icons — the 3.5-inch floppy used for save didn't age well, and a metaphor works better.

Studying art history tells you people have been making little symbols for a long time, and Kare notes bitmap fonts developed long ago with a seven-pixel capital height, quipping that she wishes she had that person. There are a lot of carvings with symbols and text, which she presents as the long backdrop to everything she drew. She is explicit that she did not design the hieroglyphics slide shown.

She likes to think there were emojis in the 1984 Macintosh — pictures you could combine with text before there was texting. There is also a hieroglyphic antecedent, and she hid hieroglyphic type symbols inside the graphics.

Her stated point is that the whole project isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything.

That desktop metaphor did not anticipate email, and she now calls the worst piece 'jars of text — why?'. She did the General Magic logo and a more literal metaphor of hallways with doors. The intent was that users could remember where things were by finding them in a logical way.

Her own verdict on the worst piece is blunt: jars of text — why? Drawers could be tapped and would come out, so you could put whatever you wanted in them.

She now finds parts of it dated: no Rolodexes, no phones that look like that, and file cabinets, though those still exist. The project could send postcards, but in her assessment it didn't quite anticipate email.

Paul Rand, the designer Kare describes as her hero, started working for magazines around age 15. His advice, delivered brusquely, was that you don't need that many fonts — you just have to know how to use them well.

She worked with Rand at NeXT, where Steve Jobs went after he had to leave Apple. She wanted to hire Rand for the NeXT logo, but Jobs hadn't really heard of him and thought they should have a contest instead.

Jobs's proposal was to hire five people or firms, pay them each 15k, pick the best and continue working with them. Her own view is that she would never think a contest is the best way to get good creative. She invited some people, then invited Paul Rand, and the recording cuts off on his reply.

Rand quoted a flat $100,000 for a single logo with no options. In Kare's account, his pitch was that he would do one logo and they would like it.

That is actually what happened — they liked it and they paid him, and she says working with him was a great learning experience for everybody.

She noticed he reused the same fonts and the same colors across his work. From that she adopted PMS 354 green, reasoning that if it was good enough for Paul Rand it was good enough for her, and she still looks in his books and uses colors he recommended.

Her father was director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, which studied taste and smell. She introduced him to Paul Rand, who made the Monell logo, and says the two got along really well.

Because he had to raise a lot of money for the science center, she treats his advice as coming from experience. She describes it as not the most cheerful advice but realistic, and says she gets depressed when she hears no.

Daniel Nord — born in Sweden, now in Portugal, who worked in London for the mayor and is an architect — told her about endless table discussions and said to do the drawing. She reads that as show, don't tell.

At her first offsite, Jobs put up three goals. Because of the second goal, programmer Steve Capps sewed a black flag and Kare painted a skull and crossbones on it, with a striped Apple as the eye patch.

They went to work in the middle of the night and climbed up on the roof, since security was a lot more lax back then. Flying the flag was, in her words, a rejoinder to the goals: that they were the pirates.

She also recalls showing the Mac to lots of people. Saying it was easy meant users could feel smart rather than dumb, even when they still had trouble with it.