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Is It Easier to Be the Best If You Are First?

Soleio says it is easy to be amongst the best if you are amongst the first. He does not know if the best energy is an energy of youth. He wonders if there is a power of naivete. When you do not know that you cannot do it, and you do not know the danger, the downsides, or what is impossible, you are far more likely to try something that has not been tried before.

Once a result is obviously doable, everybody races after it. The pattern is hard to turn into a formula, because the start looks like nothing until a leap of faith, an intuition, sprouts into the world. Nobody has a head start. Somebody who has been doing the work for decades and is the best at it stays vulnerable to the person starting today.

Susan Kare calls the point 100% true. While making icons for the Mac, there was no need to think about whether somebody else had used the idea.

Grokipedia·Susan Kare

Transcript

Twiddling Bits with Susan Kare ·

First of Kind

More from this episode

  1. Where Does Susan Kare Find Icon Ideas?Susan Kare finds icon ideas by looking at restaurant signage and traffic signage from all around the world, and by beachcombing for shells and things from the…
  2. How Did Susan Kare's Drawings First Appear on Screen?Susan Kare saw her drawings appear on a screen almost like a parlor trick, taken from paper and suddenly there.
  3. Where Did the Facebook Thumbs Up Come From?Soleio traces the Facebook thumbs up to glyphs Aaron Sittig had already drawn for ranking stories in News Feed.
  4. How Did Susan Kare Discover Graphic Design?Susan Kare discovered graphic design at 14, as a very junior part-time design assistant at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, a science museum.
  5. What Did Steve Jobs Tell Susan Kare About Twiddling Bits?Steve Jobs told Susan Kare she would twiddle bits for the rest of her life and never make more than $20,000, when she could be the creative director of a…
  6. How Much Did Paul Rand Charge Steve Jobs for the NeXT Logo?Paul Rand charged Steve Jobs $100,000 to design the NeXT logo, and he required a first-class flight, a nice hotel, and a presentation of the work.
  7. Why Does Susan Kare Still Work?Susan Kare still works because of a mortgage, and because it feels fun to be part of what is happening now in tech and a little AI.
  8. Has Susan Kare's Design Approach Changed?Susan Kare would not say her approach to design has turned upside down.
  9. Why Wasn't Apple's Software Group a Design Organization?Susan Kare was the only designer in a software group at Apple, so the group was not a design organization.
  10. Did Steve Jobs Say the Macintosh Team Would Remember Those Days?Susan Kare says Steve Jobs often said they were going to remember these days, and they did. She still remembers the early Macintosh work long after it.

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