Susan Kare

Susan Kare, born in new york, February 1954 (now 65), is an artist and graphics designer. Well known for her contribution of interface and typeface elements to the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. She was also Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985 and has since contributed at Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and Pinterest (all who she has worked for in the past).

In high school, she worked at a museum for a designer, Harry Loucks, who introduced her to typography and graphic design. She graduated with a B.A. in Art from Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD from New York University in 1978. She then moved to San Francisco and worked for the Fine Arts Museums.

Kare was originally hired into the Macintosh software group to design user interface graphics and fonts by Andy Hertzfeld. Later, she was a Creative Director in Apple Creative Services working for the Director, Tom Suiter.

She is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the original Macintosh operating system. These designs created the first visual language for Apple’s new point-and-click computing.  Kare was an early pioneer of pixel art. The most recognizable works from her time with Apple are the Chicago typeface, the Geneva typeface, the original monospace Monaco typeface, “Clarus the Dogcow”; the “Happy Mac” and the Command key symbol on Apple keyboards.