Susan Kare

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Susan Kare (* 1954 in Ithaca , New York ) is an American graphic designer . She designed most of the icons and fonts from the original Mac OS for Apple in the 1980s, and later many icons from Microsoft Windows and IBM OS / 2 .

Life and work

Mac OS fonts designed by Susan Kare

Kare graduated from Harriton High School in 1971 . 1975 followed a BA in art with summa cum laude from Mount Holyoke College . In 1978 she received her PhD from New York University . She then moved to San Francisco and worked for an art museum.

Kare worked at Apple from January 1983 to 1986 on the icons and fonts as well as marketing materials and the overall appearance of the newly developed Macintosh computer. Her most distinctive icons include the smiling Macintosh computers, Apple command key (also known as Apple key ), Dog Moof (aka Clarus the Dogcow ), wristwatch, bomb, Lasso, trash and grasping hand . Among other things, Kare developed the sans serif font Chicago for Apple .

She says of the design of minimalist symbols: “Pixel design is the modern form of a long and noble tradition in art history: Even mosaics, the famous tapestry fabric or the richly decorated houses of the Freemasons use the smallest image unit. Choosing not opulent but rather small 'bits' when designing can produce great results! "

In 1986 she was one of the first employees to join the newly founded company NeXT by Steve Jobs. In 1987 she designed in Microsoft's behalf buttons, icons and other screen elements for Windows 3.0, including the playing cards for the game Solitaire that to Windows XP in the system file cards.dll were included with Windows Vista have been replaced.

Kare has been working as a freelance graphic designer since 1988. She lives in California with her three sons. Since February 2015 MoMA has been showing Kares preliminary studies for the first graphical user interface from Apple.

Fonts (selection)

  • Geneva (font)
  • Monaco (font)
  • Chicago (font)
  • New York (font)
  • San Francisco (font)
  • Toronto (font)
  • Los Angeles (font)
  • Cairo (font)
  • Athens (font)

Awards

literature

  • Bryony Gomez-Palacio / Armin Vit (eds.): Women of Design - Influence and Inspiration from the Original Trailblazers to the New Groundbreakers. Cincinnati 2008.
  • Breuer, Gerda, Meer, Julia (eds.): Women in Graphic Design , Jovis / Berlin, 2012, pp. 484–5, ISBN 978-3-86859-153-8

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Janet Tobin: Designer Susan Kare '75 Gives Pixels Personality . In: MHC Vista, Summer 2001, volume 6, number 1 . Mount Holyoke College . 2001. Retrieved August 15, 2007.
  2. ↑ Interview with Susan Kare: The woman who gave the Apple the face. In: Spiegel Online . July 1, 2002, accessed June 10, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Susan Kare - About Me ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kare.com
  4. ↑ http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/03/27/this-is-for-everyone-free-play exhibition at MoMa on March 27, 2015, accessed on April 2, 2015
  5. ↑ http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043312/moma-recognizes-susan-kare-the-designer-of-the-macintoshs-original-icons report on Susan Kare at Fastocodesign from March 6, 2015, accessed on March 2, 2015. April 2015

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kare, Susan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American graphic designer
DATE OF BIRTH 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Ithaca