In 1982, Susan Kare was welding a life-size razorback hog for a museum, with no background in computer graphics. A year later she was designing the icons, typefaces, and the smiling startup screen that made the original Apple Macintosh feel human, work hundreds of millions of people would use without ever learning her name.
Hired into the Macintosh software group in 1983 as its only graphic designer, Kare drew the Happy Mac, the trash can, the paintbrush, and the looped-square Command symbol still printed on every Mac keyboard. She named her typefaces after world cities at Steve Jobs’s insistence, and one of them, Chicago, ran on the Mac and the first iPods for two decades. She followed Jobs to NeXT, connected him with the designer Paul Rand, then spent thirty years as an independent designer, drawing the Windows Solitaire deck that taught a generation to use a mouse, and eventually testifying for Apple in its patent fight with Samsung. Her original icon sketchbook now sits in the Museum of Modern Art.
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