Susan Kare
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Episodes
Notes
First of Kind · Twiddling Bits with Susan Kare
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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. Susan Kare says Jobs had suggested a contest instead: hire four or five firms, pay each $15,000, and if none produced a logo, pick a firm to keep working with. She does not think a bake-off gets the best design. She chose firms whose work she had seen in Communication Arts. She knew Paul Rand's work, including the UPS and Westinghouse logos. In later histories, Steve Jobs says he chose Paul Rand.
Paul Rand later asked for additional thousands of dollars to print a presentation book. The other firms showed their work. His book of the logo blew the
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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 star
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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. She thinks sometimes small ideas are very good and little advancements are great, though a ready example is hard to pull out of the air.
She saw Andy Hertzfeld on Friday because he came up for the Giants opener. They were laughing because it was the Macintosh, and the 40th birthday had come pretty recently. He wanted to show her the happy 40th birthday Macintosh graphic he had made. The graphic was a good one. The prediction was right. They did remember the days even though the time was so long ago.
She has had wonderful experiences working
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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. She reported to the head of the software group, the same as anybody else. A software librarian worked there too and was not a programmer either, though she knew how to be a software librarian.
The slogan was that real programmers arrive just in time for lunch, and the days followed it. People got in around the end of the morning, about noon, piled into a few cars, and went out for lunch together. Stops included Vivi's, a Middle Eastern place in Cupertino, plus sushi and other places, and they talked about work. They came back and started around 1 or 2, then worked into the night, somet
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Has Susan Kare's Design Approach Changed?
Susan Kare would not say her approach to design has turned upside down. After moving across different companies, different contexts, and more and more teams, with more case studies to compare and contrast, she is still a proponent of simplicity and clarity, the unsexy but fundamental things. She is probably annoying about them.
A screen should not carry endless pairs of arrows at once, and gratuitous arrows should go. It is great to absorb things from all corners, and how people present an experience adds up in a good way. She tries not to be the person who says she already saw an idea five years ago. There will be rhyming. Things go in vogue that were in vogue in some previous cycle, and t
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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.
Years ago at Whole Foods in Palo Alto, she had just come back from a job on the peninsula and was driving up to the city. She thinks she and the woman she ran into both had young children. The woman asked why she was working. What came to mind was the mortgage. The work was not just a labor of love, and the woman did not have that constraint in her life. Not everybody does.
She likes being part of something about what is happening now in tech and a little AI, working on things that are evolving, as opposed to watching from the sidelines. She also likes working
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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 Fortune 500 company, on the idea that NeXT would become one. She had followed him there after Apple. What she had learned was that she would rather twiddle bits. Those were his exact words. She would rather do that than be a manager. The phrase still sits in her head, and she can hear him say it. She does make more than $20,000.
She worked at NeXT, then took a shot at working independently for a couple of decades. The plan was to try it for a year and, with no clients, get a job. It worked out. Full-time work and independent work each carr
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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.
She made labels on a phototypositor, aligning each letter with a photographic technique that felt magical at the time, then used a stat machine to paste up material for exhibits. She worked for Harry Lauchs, a designer from Ponca City, Oklahoma, and she considers him way undersung. He studied car design at Art Center; she places the studies probably in the 1960s. He had a lyrical spirit, graduated from Art Center, and worked for Charles Eames on a World's Fair project she places in the 1960s, maybe an IBM exhibit or other work the Eames office
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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. A hand felt native to Facebook, which already used gestures such as the poke icon, and human anatomy was a load-bearing idea for a symbol meant to last.
The News Feed team realized a down rank would help people see less of some stories. The thumbs up and thumbs down were one experiment among several, and the thumbs up started as a placeholder. Hearts and stars were tried as other expressions of a like. The thumbs up was the one that felt most native to Facebook and felt like the Facebook way. Soleio gets assigned far too much credit for the mark. News Feed gained commenting and li
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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. She cannot even remember what she made, but the drawings were used, and the work turned into an interview for a job at Apple because Apple was going to need a lot of little symbols and some typefaces. She got the job and worked in the software group without knowing anything about software. She learned to appreciate what everyone was doing. People would just ask her for things and she would do them, and she had a kind of monopoly on that market.
She thinks the first thing she did was the Chicago typeface. She has a memory of it being installed. She could type with it and see it on
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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 natural world. She probably would not go to a book about user interface design. She thinks it may be hard to make a symbol that 100 people will all say means hurry. The kind of symbol she likes is one a person can be told once, either by somebody else or by looking it up in the manual, and then remember.
Restaurant signage, traffic signage, shells, and things from the natural world can be used as symbols because people connect with them already. A four-pointed arrow does not really have any intrinsic meaning. One telling is the bar sh