Pang: This is an interview with Susan Kare, September 8, 2000, at her home.
I want to start with the question of how one goes from writing a dissertation on the use of caricature in 19th and 20th century sculpture, to working on computer icons? {Susan D. Kare, "A study of the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honore Daumier and Claes Oldenburg," Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1978.}
Kare: I never would have predicted that I would work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. I intended to be either a fine artist or teacher. I moved to San Francisco and worked in the fine arts museums, and was interested in doing something different. I got to Apple through my high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, who I had known since I was 14.
Pang: That was when you two were growing up in Lower Merion?
Kare: Yes, we went to Harriton High School. My dad was a professor at Penn, in sensory physiology. He was the original director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, on 35th and Market, and studied taste and smell. It has a big sculpture of a facial fragment. {Morley Richard Kare founded the Monell Center in 1968. The Center's Web site has a picture of the sculpture.}
But by remaining friendly with Andy after high school, I knew he obviously was really interested in computers. He showed me a very rudimentary Macintosh, and mentioned that he needed some graphics for it-- he knew I was interested in art and graphics-- and that if I got some graph paper I could make small images out of the squares, he could transfer those onto the computer screen. That sounded to me like a great project. I did it in exchange for an Apple II, although I didn't actually use the Apple II for Mac graphics.
I found I liked the work, and liked the people in the Mac group I met through Andy. I was offered the possibility of a fixed-length, part-time job for this project, designing fonts and icons. I remember I didn't really know anything about digital typography, but I got as many books on it as I could, and I took them with me to the interview thinking that would increase my chances [laughs]. So I wasn't really offered the job, I was offered the interview for the job.
I still joke that there's nothing new under the sun, and bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple. I didn't have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design.
Pang: Had you done any work in computer graphics before then?
Kare: Zero.
Pang: You'd been doing freelance work for a couple years before signing on to the Mac project.
Kare: I had done traditional graphics as a freelancer, and I was making sculpture.
Pang: I want to get a sense of where working for a computer company would have fit in the world of design.
Kare: I was living in Palo Alto, welding a life-size razorback hog for a museum in Hot Springs, Arkansas, because I had been really interested in sculpture. This has more to do with me than with the Mac-- but I had thought my ideal life would be to make art full-time. I had the chance to do that with this commission, and I really enjoyed making this sculpture; but it was kind of solitary, so it was interesting for me to segue from that to working at Apple. I liked a lot of the people, and it was a great project, and it was great to be part of the Macintosh effort.
Pang: Were you working on-site, in Cupertino?
Kare: Yes. I definitely learned on the job. As when I went to Macintosh, there wasn't really an icon editor, but there was a way to turn pixels on and off. I did some work on paper, but obviously it was much better to see it on the screen, so there was a rudimentary icon editor. First they showed me how I could take the art and figure out the hex equivalent so it could be keyboarded in. Then Andy made a much better icon editor that automatically generated the hex under the icons. That was how I did the first ones. I think I did the fonts that way, going letter by letter, before we had a font editor.
Pang: Were you working on a Lisa?
Kare: No, on a Mac. Always on a Mac. Though my first Mac still had the Twiggy floppy disk drive. The Finder displayed a floppy, and had draggable titles and files.
I didn't really have much computer experience, but even then I found that rudimentary Mac more appealing to me than the Apple II. I was a typical customer that they were trying to attract, someone for whom the graphical side of it would have been attractive.
Pang: Did Andy and others have a clear sense of what kinds of icons they needed-- a trash can, files-- or was the design more uncertain?
Kare: I recall that things were pretty much open. The cursor existed. There was a paper with a folded corner. I think when I started there existed a trash can. I didn't invent that, Lisa had one, though I refined it to make it our trash can. Since Lisa used pixels that weren't square, even if one had wanted to use the exact same thing in Mac we would have had to adjust it.
Now it seems so ancient, thinking about about this. Usually they tell me what concepts they needed, and I would try to come up with a selection of things that might work. We would try them out, and the final design would evolve from there.
The documents icon existed-- the paper with the folded corner-- and I thought it was good that documents look like documents; but I thought that applications needed to look more active. That's when I came up with the icon that has a hand holding a pencil against a diamond. With that, you could easily distinguish between documents and applications. I worked on the earliest MacPaint icon, which was a brush that was painting, where the document icon included an image that would associate it with an application.
We never imagined how many, many icons there would eventually be. There were 256 number sets available for fonts, and that just seemed cavernous-- we used only a few, and assumed that number would accomodate third-party font development.
Pang: I know some of the metaphors for the interface changed over time: with Lisa, for example, the scroll bar is called the "elevator" for a while. I imagine that if you call something an elevator rather than a scroll bar, or the name trash can changes over time, that you would design different icons; or that if you designed a really cool icon, the name of a feature might change.
Kare: When I came, the title bar was always called the title bar, and I spent a LOT of time working on different designs for it. Should it have stripes, should it have little architectural details on the side? We were trying to figure out what you do to highlight that name. I think the first font that I did was very much like Chicago-- we called it "Elefont" at first, that was the placeholder name.
MacPaint was first called MacSketch, but I don't think that had much effect on the icons. Later, doing MacWrite and MacProject, I think the ideas for those always pretty clear. We definitely talked about naming things in menus, and Bill Atkinson would come in sometimes with features for MacPaint and ask," What do you think we should call this?" Now the lasso, I think maybe Bill did call it a "lasso," and had the form with the little slip knot, to make it like a lasso. I refined his image to the "final" lasso.
For while there was going to be a copy machine for making a copy of a file, and you would drag and drop a file onto it to copy it. That was visual for a while, but then it went away. It turned out was hard to figure out what you could draw that people would see as a copier. I drew a cat in a mirror, like "copy cat" [Pang laughs]-- I tried a few ideas that were not practical.
We took a very common sense approach. People would ask for something, and I would do what I thought would work. I do remember always trying-- and I still do to this day-- to provide a rich selection of choices, and see what works.People would have different suggestions.
All the programmers with whom I worked in the Mac group were very articulate, clever, creative, and had a lot of good ideas. I also had the relative luxury of being a designer, but not working with a large number of other designers. So it was a great opportunity to develop one's own ideas, and respond to other people's ideas, but not have a huge number of these things go through the classic "designed by committee" process.
Pang: So who were the people you worked with most?
Kare: Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn-- I don't want to leave anyone out-- Larry Kenyon-- I'm thinking of the room in which we sat-- Jerome Coonen, Bud Tribble-- I worked in the software group, and we had our own space. Patti Kenyon was the software librarian; she was Patti King at the time. Bill Atkinson usually worked at his house, and he came in at certain times. All great programmers. But I probably worked most closely with Andy, and a fair amount with Bill. Andy usually was the requester.
But I also worked on other things. We had the Scrapbook, and I drew the images for the Scrapbook. I was sort of a single-source vendor at the time, so I did a lot of work for Creative Services. I did some things with people writing the manuals, and worked mainly Chris Espinosa and Clement Mok, Tom Hughes, and Ellen Romana from Creative Services.
Pang: How long would it take to design a selection of possibilities for a copier or trash can?
Kare: Sometimes hours, sometimes days.
Pang: Can you explain how the Icon Editor worked? Was it like a piece of graph paper, and you clicked on the squares to draw an image?
Kare: That's pretty much it. I don't even remember very much about it now, but it was a grid with squares that toggled from black to white. After a while, I started using MacPaint to make the icons, and it had all the classic MacPaint features of being able to see the image enlarged and actual size at the same time, and being able to draw circles and lines and erase. I think with the first icon editor you could only toggle pixels, so it was great to use MacPaint.
Pang: So what was it that would define a really successful icon? Did you have some sense going into the project of what you thought a good icon would look like?
Kare: It's not usually my way to say, "This is it." As I said, I tried to make a selection and get people's opinions.
I like to think that good icons are instantly recognizable-- even if someone's never seen it, you can ask them what it does, and they get it-- or it's so easy to remember that if someone tells you want it is once, it's easy to remember when you look at it. I think that's a lot to ask of a symbol, that if you tested it everyone would all have the same one-word response as its function. But I think I had then, and still have, more of a common sense than a scientific approach to that kind of thing.
Pang: Some people were big advocates of user testing: Bill Atkinson and Larry Tesler, for example, did a lot of that. With the icons, did you just show them to people, or did you try to get a more systematic sample--
Kare: Oh, definitely-- I think it's great to test things, I just think of it more as-- when I said "not scientific," really what I meant was informal user testing, showing a lot of people and just asking them what they thought. When choosing an icon for the fill function in MacPaint, I tried paint rollers and other concepts, but I guess the pouring paint can made the most sense to people. Then there are constraints with a few things that are cursors that have one hot pixel: we tried different things to see what functioned well, and was easy to aim with. And some details came from the programmers: I didn't design the coupon-looking square marquee, whoever designed that functionality came up with that, and I tweaked it. Another time, Andy wanted to do a number puzzle, so I did the graphics for that.
Pang: I remember that from my very first Macintosh.
Kare: The puzzle, and the note pad, and some of the other things in the control panel, I worked on those with Andy. I still have on my business card the rabbit (for my fax number) and telephone from the original control panel.
Pang: What did the rabbit stand for?
Kare: There was a rabbit and tortoise, and they signified "fast" and "slow" time between mouse clicks, I think-- something to do with speed.
Pang: So who did you informally show your work to?
Kare: I'd say most of the people in the software group, and other people in the Mac group who might wander in. Steve Jobs would wander in-- Lots of people from the group would wander in.
Pang: At what point, or who was it who said, "Let's definitely go with this one, rather than these?"
Kare: I suppose Steve had some say in that, but also-- and this is my hazy memory-- it was somewhat of a consensus. I don't remember any big fights about any of that, or any big meetings to decide what the icons were going to be. It more or less evolved, thanks to lots of people's help.
Pang: I was re-reading Steven Levy's Insanely Great last night, and it sounded from his account as if Steve Jobs would look at the icons and say, "Yes this one, not this one."
Kare: I think he did, because he usually came in at the end of every day. He'd always want to know what was new, and he's always had good taste and a good sense for visual details. But I don't remember any formal meetings. He had ideas, but I was happy to mock up good ideas from anyone.
Pang: Was it a big change working in this kind of collaborative environment with software people, compared to the stuff you'd been doing before? It sounded like in some of your earlier graphic work, you worked pretty independently.
Kare: There's was noting to get adjusted to. Lots of long hours, but I don't remember anything particularly difficult in adjusting to the job.
Pang: I was thinking as much about different as opposed to difficult.
Kare: I'd had lots of other jobs working with groups of people.
Pang: In some book, someone said that the command key icon had come from a Swedish manual--
Kare: That was a concept we struggled with, because that was the control key. I can't even remember all the things we tried. We tried many, many things that were trying to be metaphors for control-- I think we tried a badge-- and they all seemed to harsh, and nothing seemed to work. So I said, "Let's try something abstract." So I was pouring through books of symbols, and I thought it was a sign on Swedish campgrounds that meant "interesting feature," or something to look at that was interesting. So that seemed to fit. And it lent itself to being digital without being jagged. That definitely came from a symbol book, or an interpretation of something in a symbol book that sort of made sense. Because I like the idea instead of just drawing some shape and saying "That's the control key," even though nobody who ever saw it-- actually, every now and then someone who actually had seen one of the signs. Mainly it is just abstract, but I knew it meant something relevant.
Pang: One of the things that the Macintosh marketing people were thinking about early on was having the Mac be something that could be sold internationally. Was this something that you tried to factor in in your work-- to develop things that didn't seem particularly American?
Kare: I think there was an awareness of that, but I don't know if we avoided things that were specifically American, so much as things that were specific to the English language. I tried not to use words, and not to use puns, because they don't translate.
Pang: So "Copy Cat" wouldn't have worked, because in Spanish or German it would mean something totally different--
Kare: --and it wouldn't make sense.
I can't think offhand of another example like that, but obviously they're legion. And beyond just not having a phone booth look like a British or American phone booth. Even the trash can-- trash cans all over the world don't look like that, and garbage trucks look even more different in different place. But I think there definitely was an awareness of that, even if there weren't banners up saying, "Think international." [Laughs]
Pang: I want to ask about the work you did on the windows-- the pinstriping on the title bar, the graying of the scroll bar, and so on. Those of us who've grown up with the Macintosh hardly notice it any longer, but why is that stuff there?
Kare: Well, as I said, I think Andy-- and you can check with Andy-- was responsible for some of that. I didn't do that basic design. I made different kinds of sliders and different kinds of fills. I'm more obsessive about making sure that all the dots line up. I think it was Steve Capps who originally came up with a concept that had horizontals in the title bar, and I ran with his concept to develop that. The horizontals were good, because they would stretch as the window was reseized. But again, it was something where I think we had different ones with different numbers of stripes, and we were just sort of asking people what they thought.
I would work with screen shots. I like to make things regular, and remove extraneous rectangles, and I think you get an overall perception that something's easy to use when the design is sparse, when it's refined. So sometimes I would get an item-- like a button, or the okay button-- and I'd just move an underline down, or take a couple pixels out of the edge, just to have it look more polished or well-crafted, if I could.
Pang: So what's the advantage to having that kind of detail, over just a title bar that has nothing?
Kare: Well, I think it's nice to have the interface offset from the data: I think it makes it look more structured, when you that kind of detailing. Did I give deep thought to why we did everything? No. [Laughs]
But you know, I think there's something nice to offsetting the main panel, and having it differ from where you would be working. The window is more like a piece of paper, and around it are things with details. Andy always says that it's good in a UI to have things be noticeable, either by being bigger, or having some attention called to them by a refinement in the surface, in proportion to their importance and frequency that you use them. That was probably also somewhat of a factor. The right height of the title bar makes it easy to drag, and calls your attention to it.
Pang: So to some degree, it's ergonomics, but it's also a matter of attention--
Kare: --some of it's attention, but some of it is just aesthetics.
Pang: There are a number of pictures that show up in the Apple manuals and promotional literature-- the pair of tennis shoes, the Japanese woman combing her hair--
Kare: Gourmet baby food--
Pang: -- and my understanding is that you drew most, if not all, of these.
Kare: Well as I said, there weren't many alternative sources of Macintosh art at the time!
Pang: Are there any stories behind the choice of those images?
Kare: You know, I think a lot of it worked with the ad agency on some of those. I know I drew the running shoe after Steve Hayden wrote the copy. I can't remember with the baby food; maybe Chiat/Day came up with the idea of having baby, but I can't really remember. Sometimes I created imaged that they could use as they saw fit.
With the Japanese lady, Bill Atkinson was experimenting with scanning, and Steve brought in an actual woodcut that he had bought: it was big and colorful, and that was one of the first things that we scanned. And I took the scan, which was kind of rough, and refined it to make the final illustration. It looks so crude now-- in terms of scanning technology-- but it seemed amazing at the time that you could get a "real" image into your computer.
Some of those images that ended up in the advertising or manuals were made on request. We did some columns because they needed to being able to show flipping horizontal, and I tried to think of things that would work for that. And we recycled some of the stuff into other places. The same thing when we wrote the "Hello" for the magazine insert. I can't remember if that "Hello" was originally a request from Chiat/Day, or from Tom Hughes and his group in Creative Services at Apple. But Tom Hughes, and Clement Mok, and Ellen Romano were the main art team in Creative Services, and Tom Suiter was the head of Creative Services, they were also requesters. I would just try to give everybody what they asked for. But I did have a fair amount of freedom, because often they would just say, "We need an illustration."
I remember Clement Mok had the idea for one illustration that was an isometric view of a kitchen; he had shown me a nice illustration of an isometric kitchen, and I had the idea of putting the robots in. They used that as sample art to show how to use different tools.
Pang: We've interviewed Andy Cunningham, Barbara Krause, and other people in Apple or Regis McKenna who worked on the event marketing, the sneaks, working with journalists, and I wanted to get a sense of what it was like to be the subject of that, to be one of the people who was part of the photo shoot with the photographer who worked with Fleetwood Mac, or in the Steven Levy article in Rolling Stone, or appearing at MacWorld. What was that like?
Kare: Extremely secondary to working on the project itself. I remember some of it being fun and different-- I wasn't a member of the key design team, so those people would probably be better able to answer that. But it wasn't something that took a lot of time; those aren't the main memories I have of working in that group. It just wasn't that big a deal.
Pang: So did the Marketing or McKenna people do background stuff with you before events?
Kare: I don't even remember that much about it. I remember being in a couple photo shoots, and that was interesting. The Rolling Stone photographer was very good, and because I'm in graphics it was interesting for me to see how people like that work. Mostly what I remember was being in my cube [Pang laughs], and trying to get done what needed to be done.
Pang: There have been various accounts of relations between the Mac group and the rest of the whole, particularly the Apple and Lisa people. Did you have much contact with other people elsewhere in Apple, other than in Marketing and Creative Services?
Kare: Not that much in my realm, but I don't remember there being much animosity. I made friends in other parts of Apple.
The one incident I can explain, because I was there, was that sometimes people thought the pirate flag was some kind of declaration of war. Actually, we had had a Mac offsite, and at every offsite, Steve would get up and write some slogans on an easel that were relevant to what was going to be talked about at the offsite. One was "Let's be pirates, not join the navy;" another was "Real artists ship;" and I can't remember what the third one was. When Steve Jobs had introduced that notion of "let's be pirates," he meant, let's have a renegade feeling to our group, we can move fast, we can get things done; it was not anti-anybody-- it was the notion of having the advantages of a small company.
When we got back, Steve Capps sewed that pirate flag, and I painted the skull and crossbones with the Apple in one eye. One night we climbed up-- which was kind of exciting!-- to the top of the building and put that flag up. It was for the Mac group-- to remind people of Steve's talk at the offsite.
Pang: One thing about the pirate metaphor is that it has a kind of machismo that made me wonder if there were any issues for women working at Apple.
Kare: My answer is exactly what Caroline Rose said. I felt as if I could do my job, and that was not any kind of problem or issue. I can't recall her words exactly, but whatever she said, that's what I think, too.
Pang: Sandy Miranda said that women were in more positions of authority at Apple than anywhere else she'd worked in.
Kare: We had a female CFO [chief financial officer, Debbie Coleman], and lots of women in senior positions. And Steve Jobs never had any trouble with that.
Pang: You were creative director at Apple for a couple years.
Kare: After the Mac shipped, and-- I can't remember exactly what stage the product was in, but I was recruited by Tom Suiter to go work in Creative Services, at a time when it seemed as if the main Mac development was over. I was always impressed by Tom: I thought he was really creative, and capable, and was particularly interested in working with him. He's very talented, and went on to co-found the CKS Group.
But I realized, by working in Creative Services at Apple and NeXT, that what I really wanted to do was to be back doing bitmaps. And I've been doing that ever since.
I realize that I was very, very lucky to have that job at Apple, because I find it really interesting to solve that problem of, How do you make a concept in 16-by-16 black and white dots? I'm still really interested in that. I really like doing things in color, but if I could pick a project that I would start tomorrow, it would be redoing the phone graphics for Nokia cellphones. That would be a good match for me.
Pang: I noticed there are a number of books in your office on Japanese language, art, and culture. Do you think there's a connection between your interest in Japanese art, and your interest in simple designs?
Kare: Yes. I didn't formally study Japanese art in college-- I mainly studied Western art-- but when I first lived in San Francisco, I lived beside the Buddhist Temple of San Francisco, and they had a Japanese school, and I went there for a number of years. And these books are useful in my work [goes over to shelf, pulls one down]-- I don't know if you've seen this one.
Pang: No I haven't. [Reads] Kanji Pictograms.
Kare: I think it's a great book. I got it because it would show you all the pictures that the characters stand for, as a mnemonic, to help you remember the characters, but I really like it because I've pulled it out when I'm completely stuck. I always go to books when I'm stuck-- not all symbol books, but it's good to look at road signs, for example, to get your started. I always start with the index, but of course what you're looking for is never in the index [laughs]. I don't think of them as icons, but it shows you that some of the kanji are more iconic than you would think.
Pang: Do you remember any particular books you had in your cubicle at Apple that you'd look at when you--
Kare: [Kare pulls out another book] Yeah, I definitely liked this one--
Pang: [Reads] Henry Dreyfus' Symbol Sourcebook, for those readers who aren't here and can't see this, with a forward by Buckminster Fuller.
Kare: One of my favorite parts of the book is its list of hobo signals, that hobos used to contact each other when they were on the road. They look like they're in chalk on stones.
Pang: I had no idea there was such a thing.
Kare: When you're desperate for an idea-- some icons, like the piece of paper, are no problem; but others defy the visual, like "undo"-- you look at things like hobo signs. [Points to one, reads] Like this: "Man with a gun lives here." Now, I can't say that anything in this book is exactly transported into the Macintosh interface, but I think I got a lot of help from this, just thinking. This kind of symbol appeals to me because it had to be really simple, and clear to a group of people who were not going to be studying these for years in academia. I don't understand a lot of them-- "These people are rich" is a top hat and a triangle-- but I always had that at Apple. I still use it, and I'm grateful for it.
And I look at a lot of craft books, and folklore books, and maybe that art history did give me a sense-- I am a big believer that there is a rich history of symbols from which you can draw even for concepts and icons, whether from fine art or folk art, or advertising or bottle caps. So I had my shelf of books from college, and some that I picked up that were kind of random.
Sometimes people e-mail me now, and say "How do you learn to design icons?" and "Are there any good books about learning how to design icons?" I think it's more-- you can spread your net wider, and get idea from all over.
Kare: Are there any books about how to design computer icons?
Kare: [laughs] I don't know.
Pang: Of all people, you're the one who would least need such a book, after all.
Kare: There are certainly books about designing logos. I'm a huge Paul Rand fan, and I think he always was one of the most articulate, excellent writers and designers. Sometimes when I'm thinking about my own icon work, I read what he wrote about his work, and about trying to put meaning into what you do; so if you don't have a multibillion-dollar advertising budget, it helps if you can infuse some meaning in that symbol.
Pang: Paul Rand designed the NeXT logo. Were you involved in that?
Pang: Yes. I did hire him. I introduced Steve to his books, and then we contacted him. I didn't know him, but I'd always admired his work. So that was a fantastic opportunity for me, to be able to meet and work with someone who had been a hero to me, and introduce him to Steve. And I think Steve and I both learned a lot from him. He was very unequivocal [laughs], a great person with a tremendous amount of self-confidence: I remember him almost pounding the table, saying "I've been doing this for fifty-five years, and I know what you should do!" It must be great to have that much confidence in such an inexact science.
Pang: One thing some of the Hovey-Kelley people talked about was that working with Steve Jobs was interesting because of his design sense, his intuition for products. It sounds like you had somewhat the same experience with him, connecting with him at that level.
Kare: He was running Apple when I met him, but he was interested in the Macintosh at every level. It seemed to me that he was a person capable of making meaningful contributions in hardware, software, advertising, icons, fonts. Sure, he's a well-known and controversial figure, but I had a lot of respect for him because I never knew anybody who had such a broad band of ability to contribute good ideas in many realms. Not that every single idea was The Idea, or the best idea, or even good, or that he wouldn't listen to others. I think he definitely has a style of pushing back and being critical, to push you to see if you had explored every option. I remember him as great to work with, being excited over things that were new that we had done that we could show him, and it being a very motivating factor, because when he's happy and pleased with an idea he can make you feel great.
But he used to say, "We'll all look back on this project, and it will have been a really great moment in time of working on this great project together." He was right about that: I look back on it and think about what terrific colleagues I had, and we had great work experiences, and great offsites. Of course, you look back on your life and there definitely were moments when you were bleeding, or had bad things that happened to you, or you were sick; but you don't look back and think about the times you were in bed with the flu. You think of the good things, and I can just think of so many positive, positive things with the Mac.
I am still friendly with, and work with, a number of people from the Mac group. One person I worked with who I thought was brilliant was Joanna Hoffman. She focused on international marketing, and she was great to work with, and always had ideas. She was a person who wasn't in software, but who made great contributions. I could name a long list of people like that.
Pang: How did you know the Hovey-Kelley guys?
Pang: I was friendly with Rickson Sun and Michele Lee; I met them in the early 1980s in Palo Alto, and through them I met David Kelley. There was one point where David and I went to see Paul Rand, so David Kelley Design must have been doing something with NeXT. It wasn't that my role at Apple put us in contact-- I know they did some work with the icons in the back, so I might have worked with them a little on that.