Y CombinatorSusan Kare: How I Designed the Original Apple Mac Icons
Y Combinator
A Different Kind of Talk 0:07
Susan Kare opens by introducing herself as an iconographer who worked on many tech projects, and she focuses this talk on her time at Apple's Macintosh group. She recalls a guiding quote from Paul Rand, the celebrated designer behind the UPS and IBM logos, who told her to always make things meaningful and memorable, and that a good idea should come before the form it takes.
From Welding Hogs to Apple 2:02
Before Apple, Kare was an art major with no computer background, welding a life-size razorback hog for an Arkansas museum, work she enjoyed but found lonely. Her high school friend Andy Herzfeld, a Macintosh programmer, invited her to interview for a job making small symbols and typefaces. She had only casual typography experience from making museum labels, so she borrowed font books from the library and brought them to her interview to seem prepared, and made sample bitmap graphics on graph paper without much guidance. She got the job without being tested on fonts, and that early sketchbook now sits in the permanent collection of MoMA.
Building a Friendly Computer 5:31
On her first day, Kare was shown the existing screen, including a menu button labeled "do it" that was quickly renamed "OK" for being off-color. The team's mission was to build a computer anyone could use, without needing a manual, and the group was full of people passionate about making computing approachable. She worked within strict technical limits, icons were only 16 by 16 pixels in black and white, and she treated those constraints as a source of creativity rather than a burden.
Designing Chicago and Other Fonts 8:30
Her first font, Chicago, had a nine-pixel cap height and used horizontals, verticals, and 45-degree angles to look tidy on screen. It later became the font used on the first iPod. She and Andy Herzfeld built other bitmap fonts named after towns near their Philadelphia high school, but Steve Jobs told them to use "world class" city names instead, leading to New York and Geneva. She also created a font called Ransom, styled after ransom notes made from cut-up newspaper letters. Working with programmer Bill Atkinson, who wrote MacPaint and built an early scanner, she helped create the geisha image and animated control panel patterns, avoiding text so the interface could work internationally.
Tools, Icons, and Early Mistakes 12:31
Andy Herzfeld's icon editor let Kare toggle pixels directly, a huge leap from graph paper, even without undo or shape tools. She designed the Happy Mac startup icon, inspired by a smiley button she liked as a teenager, drawing on the idea from Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics that simple faces feel universal while detailed ones feel specific. This shaped her belief that icons should carry only one or two telling details, like the simple stick figures on a school crossing sign. Some early icons were meant as private jokes never meant to be seen, like a hungover "sick Mac" and a Bugs Bunny–style bomb for total system failure, but the bomb icon later alarmed a real user who called Apple fearing her computer would explode.
Icons as Metaphors, Not Portraits 20:00
Kare paired application icons with matching document icons, starting with MacPaint, and applied a similar logic to system symbols, like a cropped, faceless figure for alerts and a watch replacing the old hourglass. She warns against tying icons too closely to physical products, noting how the floppy disk save icon eventually aged poorly, and prefers metaphor over literal depiction. When Steve Jobs rejected a menu of little Apple logos as disrespectful to the brand, Kare found an alternate symbol for the command key in a library book, a four-leaf-clover-like "feature" mark, which she later learned in Sweden actually derived from the aerial shape of a 1200 AD Swedish castle ruin, a coincidence that pleased her.
Historical Roots and Later Projects 26:30
Kare draws parallels between her pixel-grid icons and much older symbol systems, including Egyptian hieroglyphics and centuries-old bitmap-like typefaces, suggesting humans have long made small symbolic marks. She briefly surveys later projects: alarm clock icon studies for Swatch, colorful icon work for Microsoft Windows 3.0, Solitaire graphics, a hallway-and-drawers desktop metaphor for General Magic, and Facebook's paid virtual gift program, where cute imagery, like teddy bears, hearts, and penguins, consistently outsold luxury-themed items.
More Recent Work and Design Lessons 34:31
She lists further projects including animated icons for Pinterest, a trash panda logo for a stealth startup, pixel-art train route illustrations for Amtrak's magazine, a puzzle-game logo, avatar designs, badges for a crypto wallet, and a quick weekend logo project for a venture capital firm focused on working outdoors. She closes this stretch by returning to lessons from Paul Rand, who believed designers do not need many fonts, just skill in using them. She recalls hiring him for the NeXT logo after he refused a multi-firm contest format and instead demanded $100,000 to design one logo that the client would like, which is exactly what happened. Rand also warned against arbitrary logo symbols, as seen in AT&T's shifting logos, and favored designs tied directly to meaning, like IBM's pinstripes or the UPS package-and-shield logo, which his young daughter once described simply as "a present."
Advice from mentors and family 42:30
Susan Kare shares a series of quotes and lessons gathered from people in her life, including her father, who gave realistic if not cheerful advice from his fundraising work, and architect Daniel Nord, who told her to make ideas visual rather than just talking about them, essentially show, don't tell.
Stories from Apple colleagues 44:02
She recalls Jean Pigozzi, a friend met through Steve Jobs, fondly remembering the fun of working on the Macintosh. She credits Alan Kay, seen with Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, and Steve Jobs, with the idea of nesting interface elements so ease of use feels possible, and recalls his delight that proportionally spaced fonts turned out to look good. She also tells the story of raising a pirate flag with Steve Capps on the Apple roof, a gesture tied to one of the early offsite goals.
Lessons on scale and feedback 47:01
She notes that showing early Macintosh demos revealed some people could use it and others could not, yet users felt smart rather than dumb when told it was supposed to be easy. She calls Steve Jobs's warning against buying Apple stock the worst advice she got, and mentions choosing to stay a bit twiddler rather than become a creative director. She reflects that teams work well by consensus up to about fifteen people, and shares Andy Hertzfeld's tip to show Jobs several options rather than one. She closes by thanking Y Combinator for the smooth, gracious event.
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