Susan Kare

Susan Kare earned a bachelor's degree in art from Mount Holyoke College and a doctorate in fine arts from New York University. A friend from high school, Andy Hertzfeld, asked her to design some graphics for the Macintosh he was helping to build, and in January 1983 she joined the team.

At a time when the screen was a grid of black and white dots, Kare worked with a bitmap editor to draw the icons and typefaces that defined the early Mac look: the smiling Happy Mac that greeted users at startup, the trash can, the paintbrush and the wristwatch cursor. She also designed the bitmap fonts Chicago and Geneva, naming the fonts after cities, and the symbol still used on the Command key. Her small, deliberate pictograms made computing feel approachable to people who had never used a command line.

After the Macintosh launched she worked as creative director in Apple's creative services, and in 1986 she followed Steve Jobs to NeXT as its creative director. She later designed icons for Microsoft Windows, including playing cards for the Solitaire game, and has produced interface artwork for companies such as Facebook and Pinterest. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.