For $1900, former Apple designer, Susan Kare will take you back in time.
The holidays are coming, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas, many of us who love trivia games, will most likely come across questions like: “Who invented the Lasso icon?” and “Who created the Paint Bucket icon?”. Many of these interface elements now common across virtually all graphic software and word editing apps, believe it or not, weren't the lucky, random creation of some anonymous engineer struck by a moment of inspiration. These elements, and more which we take for granted,, were designed and immortalized by one Apple graphic designer, Susan Kare, for the original Macintosh graphical user interface.
“It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.”
When the original Apple team moved into a new building, in 1983, programmer Steve Capps and Susan Kare created the Pirate flag, embodiment of Steve Jobs famous slogan: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.”. The skull and crossbones sporting the iconic multicolored Apple logo as the eye-patch, flew over the Apple campus for a full year before being removed and placed in the annals of tech history.
Among some of Susan’s creations, aside from the Paint Bucket, Lasso and Grabber icons, many of the popular original typefaces in the original Macintosh operating system were also created by Susan, such as Chicago, Geneva and Monaco.
Susan was also responsible for the Happy Mac, which some of us will remember as the smiling computer screen greeting Mac users on boot up, and the Command Key.
After Apple, Kare was hired by NeXT, Steve Jobs own company, and maker of the very first World Wide Web Server built for Tim Berners-Lee, after Jobs was forced out of Apple. During that time, Kare worked on many projects for clients like Microsoft, for which she created the card deck graphics for Windows 3.0 Solitaire game, as well as many Microsoft Windows icons and interface elements that stayed largely unchanged until Windows XP. Other notable work was the icon set for IBM OS/2.
Susan Kare is now making available hand painted replicas of the flag. Collectors with a particular interest in owning historic icons can purchase replicas of the original, online, for $1900, individually signed by Susan Kare herself.