Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms,” she said, “all of which I had practiced before going to Apple.” Kare later recalled in interviews how she “loved the puzzle-like nature of working in sixteen-by-sixteen and thirty-two-by-thirty-two pixel icon grids, and the marriage of craft and metaphor. She arrived with a gridded notebook and began sketching out ideas around pixel-based design constraints. In recent years, Kare has done work for Facebook and Pinterest as well.īut Kare’s big break came back in 1982 when a friend invited her to apply to Apple. Later designs made for other computing companies like IBM and Microsoft, including notepad and control panel icons, have also stuck around in some form or another (with iterations along the way). Typefaces like Chicago and Gothic also persisted long after the original operating systems for which they were designed went away. Her pixel art formed the basis for digital tool icons still in use today, including the command symbol as well as the lasso and paint bucket commonly found in visual editing programs. Kare’s influence both initially and over the decades that followed is hard to overestimate. But few Mac users computing in the 1980s knew at the time how much of their visual experience traced back to one woman: Susan Kare. From the friendly smiling startup icon to the dreaded bomb icon (signalling a fatal system error), it was the graphics that brought early Macintosh computers to life and set them apart from text-based PCs.

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