Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 4, 2023: Susan Kare, an American artist, and graphic designer (#1844)

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Artist of the Day, July 4, 2023: Susan Kare, an American artist, and graphic designer (#1844)

Susan Kare (1954) is an American artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, and Facebook, Pinterest and she is now an employee of Niantic Labs. As an early pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant technologists of the modern world.

Susan Kare is a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, the San Francisco-based designer has designed thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Designed on a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their functions immediately and memorably.

After graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Susan Kare took a curatorial job at an art museum, where she quickly realized that she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. In 1982, Kare began work at Apple as the sole creator of screen graphics in the Macintosh group. As the designer “who gave the Macintosh a smile,” she is best known for developing the distinctive icons, typefaces, and other pixel elements that gave the Macintosh its characteristic—and widely emulated—friendly look and feel. Her total lack of software experience turned out to be an asset, since she could empathize with the non-technical users of the new computer. In 1986, she joined Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer as the tenth employee. Several years later, she began Susan Kare Design, a graphics studio, and spent a few decades developing humane solutions to design problems for hundreds of clients. Since 2015, she has worked as a Creative Director at Pinterest, a company known for being the home of inspiration.

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and SF MoMA, and has been exhibited at the London Design Museum. She is the recipient of the AIGA medal (2018) and Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum/Smithsonian Institution (2019). View Susan Kare's portfolio.

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