Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac
Susan Kare, the iconographer for the original Macintosh, discusses her journey designing system fonts, icons, and graphics under severe technical constraints (16x16 black and white pixels). She shares design principles learned from mentors like Paul Rand, her experiences across multiple tech companies, and the philosophy that simplicity, metaphor, and meaningful design create universal, memorable user interfaces.
Summary
Susan Kare recounts her transition from being a sculptor and art major to becoming the lead designer for the Macintosh. Recruited by high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, she arrived at Apple with minimal computer experience but strong typographic training. She designed the Chicago font (9 pixels tall) and numerous icons under severe constraints: 16x16 black and white resolution, no anti-aliasing, and the goal of creating an intuitive interface anyone could use without a manual.
Kare explains her design philosophy, heavily influenced by Paul Rand's principle to "focus on making things meaningful and memorable." She designed the Happy Mac startup icon based on a happy face button, the Command key symbol (inspired by a Swedish castle symbol), and tool icons like the lasso and paint bucket. She discusses mistakes like the bomb icon for system crashes, which inadvertently alarmed a user who feared her computer would explode.
The designer emphasizes that simplicity creates universality—citing Scott McCloud's insight that excessive detail makes faces look like specific people, while simple icons allow viewers to project themselves onto them. She demonstrates this with examples like simple pencil icons being more effective than chrome pens with reflections.
Kare details her work post-Apple at companies including Microsoft (Windows 3.0 with color), General Magic, Facebook (a dollar-gift program), Pinterest, and numerous logo projects. She shares advice from influential figures: Paul Rand on using fonts and colors sparingly; Daniel Nord on making ideas visual; Alan Kay on user interface nesting; and various mentors on persistence, showing multiple options rather than single concepts, and knowing when to move to the next idea.
Throughout, she emphasizes that design is iterative, constraints breed creativity, and the best icons work through metaphor and meaning rather than literal representation.
About this episode
<p>Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and human, defining a visual language for personal computing that still influences software today.At Startup School 2026, Susan shares the stories behind the Happy Mac, Command key, Chicago font, and more, along with the design lessons she learned from Steve Jobs, Paul Rand, and the original Mac team: make things meaningful and memorable, embrace constraints, iterate constantly, and use just enough detail to make an idea instantly clear.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/susan-kare-on-designing-the-original</p>
Key Insights
- Kare argues that simple, low-detail design creates universality because viewers can project themselves onto minimalist symbols, whereas detailed designs make icons look like specific things and alienate broader audiences.
- She claims that design constraints (like 16x16 black and white pixels) actually enable creativity rather than limit it, and that understanding constraints allows designers to get excited about working within them.
- Kare demonstrates that metaphor-based icons (like using a lasso tool for selecting irregular regions) are more intuitive and memorable than literal product representations, and that literal designs age poorly when products change.
- She argues that showing multiple design options to stakeholders is more effective than presenting a single concept, as it allows decision-makers to provide feedback while still having choices rather than forcing rejection and rework.
- Kare contends that proportionally spaced fonts were a significant advancement that most people didn't recognize as important, significantly improving readability by preventing letter squishing common in monospace fonts.
- She claims that cute and simple designs consistently outperform complex or expensive-looking designs—evidenced by penguins and heart-shaped images outselling luxury item illustrations in Facebook's gift program.
- Kare asserts that abstract symbols can be harder to remember than metaphor-based ones, but that historical precedent (like the Command key symbol being based on a 1200 AD castle) shows that symbols often have unexpected meaningful origins.
- She argues that design is "not an exact science" and benefits from examining both client briefs and programmer placeholders, as these sources often inspire better solutions than starting from scratch.
Topics
Transcript
Hello, I'm Susan Kerr and now for something completely different. I've been an iconographer and designer. I've worked on a lot of tech projects, and I want to talk about a tech startup I worked for when, even though the Macintosh Group was part of Apple, but I think a lot of the experiences resonate with some of the topics that I've heard here today. that I've heard here today. So I've been doing this for a while and love it. Here's a few things that I designed over the years and it's funny because this was really a North Star for the Macintosh group. But when I reread it in the last couple of days, it just kind of…
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