The garbage can, the paint can, the mythical happy icon when starting the Mac or the disk to save files, Susan Kare designed them all. These and most of the icons of the original Apple Macintosh of 1984, which have laid the foundations of visual language that allows you to move around a device based on clicking on images. Icons so recognizable today that they have become legendary.
In 1983, Susan Kare was a young sculptor when she received the call from her friend Andy Hertzfeld, software designer of the first Macintosh system and its graphical interface. I asked her if she would be interested in accepting a project that consisted of creating graphics and fonts for the new personal computer that Apple planned to launch in 1984, a challenge she accepted even though she had never designed fonts or fonts. Thus, Kare entered to work in the Steve Jobs team among a whole deployment of artists, musicians, graphic designers and other geeks to form the less orthodox systems department.
One of his missions was to create the first non-monospaced typefaces for computers: until then, the technical limitations had led to the text boxes of each letter being the same size, giving the set a squared appearance. It was a concern of Steve Jobs, who 10 years ago had attended a calligraphy course, so he decided that his Macintosh should take special care for typography. Kare quickly learned everything he needed to know about typography and made sure the design was elegant and eye-catching, but basic and easy to read in the limited resolution of the first computer screens.
"The first typeface I designed was Chicago because we needed a bold system font," Kare recalled during the 2019 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award ceremony, in which he received recognition for his professional career.
"It was like working with sewing needles"
Designing the icons proved to be a major challenge for the artist. The reproduction of works of art on those primitive CRT surfaces, which used a matrix system of bitmaps with points of light or pixels to display the data, was the nightmare of every designer. Andy Hertzfeld suggested Kare get the smallest graph paper he could find. On the sheet, the designer blocked a 32 by 32 square grid that began to color to create the graphics.
Thus, after Kare wrote down several ideas and concepts, the garbage can, the computer disk or the blank document with the corner of the folded page came out of those sketches.
Susan Kare learned from her mother how to make counted thread embroidery, which gave her the basic knowledge she needed to create the first icons for the Apple Macintosh 35 years ago.
"It so happened that I had small black and white grids to create the designs. The whole process reminded me of working with needles, knitting patterns or mosaics. I'm lucky to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts," he commented at the awards ceremony for the Smithsonian website. This simplicity is not necessarily a limitation: "Visual complexity is not always directly proportional to effectiveness, the key to the creative process is still to get an image that works as a symbol for your target audience," explains Kare.
In this way, he was responsible for defining the graphic language, the icons and even part of the initial marketing . Kare recovered the idea of common office material as a metaphor for the desk, and from a grid notebook, and with all the technical limitations of that time, masterfully created the dozens of icons that accompanied the new functions of this graphic system, giving them a personality that , today, it still lasts.
"I think of the icons more as traffic signs than as illustrations, but above all I believe in simplicity and manual labor, which guarantees part of the success of these works," the designer confessed.
Pioneer in communicating with a reduced pixel grid
A principle that not only applied to its creations for Apple, but also in its icons and graphics for other clients such as Facebook, IBM, Microsoft. Most of them are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and, together, they have won the Cooper Hewitt Professional Career Award.
In the book Susan Kare Icons , published in 2013, the designer talks about how the command icon (⌘) - or the so-called "Apple key" (the Ctrl on PCs) - was originally a symbol used to describe people with special features in the Swedish camps. This and other details that he captured during his trips to Sweden were some of the starting points in the design of his icons.
Getting to communicate with a reduced grid of pixels and with a style of its own is a challenge that goes beyond trends. Proof of this is that many of these icons are still alive and communicate with the same efficiency to a generation of users who do not know, for example, what a floppy disk is. The magic of a well designed icon.